Taking My Medication

As a schizophrenic, taking medication is an important part of my daily life. If I were to stop taking them, bad things could happen overtime. I guess an issue is that not enough is known about schizophrenia to know how long it would take for the symptoms to come back. Actually, I am fairly confident that psychiatrist have no set time for how long it takes for a patient to feel better when being first put on anti-psychotics. So how would they know how long it would take for one to relapse? The fact is that everyone reacts differently to the same medication—I’m assuming there are no concrete universal indicator. And also from experience, I know that the way I behave on the outside is not the same as how I am feeling internally—yet what I portray on the outside is how I am diagnosed.

I guess in some regards it is good there are many different anti psychotics out there, as it means if one medication doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world for you. Again as I had mentioned in the clozapine post, there is a bit of a downside to having so many different anti psychotics out there. Psychiatrists are reluctant to prescribe the most effective anti-psychotic, clozapine, and thus it could, as in my case, take months before I was prescribed it—they would rather try countless other anti psychotics first, or even a combination. I had one psychiatrist who believed that a combination of two anti-psychotics would be as effective as clozapine—I severely relapsed about a couple of months later, being in and out of hospital three times before being stable on clozapine again.

Essentially, I wrote this post to discuss what happens if I were to not take my medication. As mentioned previously, I had relapsed once before and it was not pleasant. At first, you think you might be fine, because you lived it before. You think you know how to keep yourself from believing things that you think you already know aren’t real. But in the end it invariably results in paranoia and poor life choices. I had thought that someone who lived with me wanted to kill me, and I believed it even though I knew I had schizophrenia. Again, I thought that the delusions were real, they were not due to my symptoms. I ended up being hospitalized in and out for so long that I had to drop many of my high school credits, which put me behind even more. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I tried to purposefully fail myself being how delusional I was.

Because of these experiences, I do try to take my medication daily. But being a university student, my GPA is very important to me. I am set on getting into a Master’s program for Medical Physics. The problem with the medication is that it makes me sleep excessively. Taking my medication can be a problem if I need to pull an all-nighter, as I pass out about 1 hour to 1 ½ hours after taking them. It can also be a problem if I need to sleep very little, as I will sleep an average of 10-12 hours at night because of taking it. Usually, in the case I need to sleep very little, I will take less than the required dose. I limit myself to doing this once a week maximum; I guess my biggest worry is that if I don’t take my medication too often, I won’t be able to concentrate—that is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Also hearing voices would be extremely distracting.

The issue I guess is that I need to find a balance. I don’t want to let medication ruin my life. It’s something that I have to take for the rest of my life and thus I don’t want to be too burdened by it. Yes, what I have is considered a permanent disability, but sometimes it is hard for me to see that. Whether it’s to pull an all-nighter or just when I take less than my full dosage so I won’t oversleep, I don’t feel too guilty doing it. I also drink, which is sometime I am not allowed to do on medication.

I guess the main reason I don’t care is that psychiatrists aren’t even fully clear at what happens if you skip medication every once in a while. When will I relapse?—I have never received a concrete answer to this question. I’ve also talked to psychiatrists about my drinking, and even though they tell me I’m not supposed to, they don’t seem to emphasize it too much. When I live my life, I feel my greatest disability is that I am reliant on these medications. And most of the time I don’t want to feel tied down. I don’t know if some time down the line I will relapse, but hopefully I’ll be fine as I am sure I am. I just need to find the right balance.