How Much Longer Should I Give Psych Meds a Chance?

[jdogg60]

My family and most of the therapists I've talked to strongly encourage me to stick with psychiatry...keep trying until you find the right meds and dosage.

I don't have a lot of faith that the psych meds will ever get me to feel good enough to want to live. My alternative is to try tapering off zoloft, and pray that a heroic dose mushroom trip - potentially with a very good therapist -
could get me right.

It'd be extremely risky, because a bad trip is what got me into this mess (mostly due to poor setting)...but I tend to believe if there's anything that has potential for actual healing, its the psychadelics rather than psych meds. If a big mushroom trip doesn't help, or makes things worse, I think CTB would be my only solution.

 

[Dissolving Figment]

It's like 3 months per med from what I hear

Maybe try a couple I guess

Psychs never really helped with my depression, if anything they made things worse
I feel like if they would've helped they would've helped right away

 

[Higurashi415]

It's very personal and you didn't mention your diagnosis, which is a pretty important point as some conditions are more understood and "figured out" than others. You also didn't mention how long you've been trying it, so I'll try to give a broad answer which will hopefully be useful to you.


I'm sure you're aware, but you must consider that you need a couple of months PER MED to even know if it's doing anything; and if you want to switch meds you can't do it right away most of the times (although some criminal psychiatrists definitely do that).
So you need 2 months to know if it's working, and 2-4 weeks before you can try another med (could be WAY more than 2-4 weeks btw, depends on the med and how long you've been taking it, it's complicated).

Dosage is also a HUGE factor, so it's likely that you couldn't even conclude that it's not working after 2 months.
You might also find out, after a year of trying meds, that you've been misdiagnosed and thus given the wrong meds for your condition; that's what happened to me and many others.

With this in mind, this stuff takes a lot of time, patience, consistency and strength, unfortunately.
To try 5 meds, which isn't even that many, you're looking at a year and a couple months minimum, for example. I'd say 2-3 years is fair, but again it really depends