in terms of managing
PTSD without meds - meds don't teach any skills, and you can't learn to cope if the meds actually do the job they are claimed to, which is to numb away the feelings you are wanting to learn to cope with.
and if the meds aren't doing that job, then WTF are they being taken for?
I'm sorry if this has been said elsewhere, I might have missed it... but in my case I take meds so I can learn to cope with feelings that while they are a bit more under control. As I learn to deal with them, the idea is to become less reliant on medication.
Like many people I've had many experiences trying a wide variety of antidepressants - with no luck. I'm now taking a mood stabilizer, theoretically for Bipolar Type II but it also makes me drowsy so I take it at night to help me sleep.
I also take benzodiazepines and one of the newer off-label beta blockers. Both have helped me be less scared to sleep, for example. This is important to me, because I have nightmares most nights, so even when I am exhausted, and want to sleep, my subconscious keeps me up....somewhere I'm terrified to go to sleep.
Unfortunately this means I need fairly high dosages of meds to help me get the sleep I need... but getting better sleep makes me feel physically better during the days, my thought process is more clear, which allows me to talk or write or think things through. In particular, it helps me speak about some of my most soul-crushing anxieties and thoughts within the confines of therapy. I've processed, gone through, a number of these anxieties. Since I trace my PTSD to several discrete events in my life, medicine allows me to calm down and compartmentalize in a healthy enough manner that I can work on one trauma or another (e.g.., CSA, or Sept.11th), ...without being absolutely flooded with irrational panic, fear, other emotions. I make sure my psychiatrist knows what I'm doing in therapy, and my therapist knows what meds I'm taking, and that way I get feedback from more sources than my immediate family. Sometimes balancing is involved. Add one, take less of another. I've been taking many of these meds at varying dosages for more than 10 years.. The most recent addition is in the past year or so, a beta blocker, Propranolol (which is akin to prazosin, I have seen mentioned on this board), which has been a tremendous help in alleviating nightmares... well that one I've only been on for maybe a year or two and it helps me feel less terrified upon waking from nightmares.
Less terrified is good. I also feel less foggy, not dragged down quite as much by the weight of my subconscious mind.
Now, then you get down to individual side effects and see that my blood pressure can run 82 over 56 and that is not ideal. But I pay attention and continue to look for a balance that allows me to be clear-headed enough to think things through in a logical manner, while also ..well yes a certain amount of numbing is indeed involved. I do not want to be numb to life now, nor do I want to numb myself at all for the rest of my life, but the hope, and the plan with my dr and therapist, is that a little numbing now will help me, give me the space to learn to prevent the most dreadful heartbreaking feelings, without relying so much on meds *in the future.* I don't even think numbing is quite the right word for it. I think I would call it "curbing". If my choice is to be terrified I'm going to die every second of every day, well that's no good. Meds allow me to cope, while I am working in therapy, learning to cope without meds, or with lower doses.
Sometimes I *wish* they'd "numb away" but it doesn't work that way - not for me at any rate.
