Medicine don't work on me the way they are supposed to

[Anaaewp]

Hi, I was diagnosed with high functioning autism recently at 28 years old, and throughout my life I've been to neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists that have tried to treat me for anxiety, social-phobia and depression, to no avail. Usually, when they try to medicate me, I end up with terrible collateral effects, so I gave up on trying them (then I found out it was actually autism this whole time and my family sorta knew, surprise).

This year I've been going through a hard time, I can't sleep, my short term memory sucks, I'm nervous all the time, etc, you know the drill. And I'm trying herbal medicine to see if it can at least help me calm down a bit. I'm taking something based on passioflora (here in my country the name of the medicine is Maracugina), which is supposed to work for insomnia, stress and anxiety. And, of course, it's not working the way it's supposed to. I do feel less on the brink of losing it, sure, but I also feel more agitated and even less sleepy.

Is it just me? I don't know what to do. Someone told me some medicine don't work well with autistic people, and I'm wondering if this is the case and if anyone here has been through a similar experience.

(sorry for any mistakes, English is not my first language and I'm not functioning on my best right now)

 

[Streetwise]

The medicine will probably be for clinical depression or unipolar depression ,its probably not for anxiety try hops(used in making beer) research medicines that calm, stimulants work really for a very weak heart or lungs ,not for hyper states like anxiety in autism .
You need!!!!!!!! to talk!!!!!! constructively, not !!!!!!destructive thinking like I'm useless or ugly for instance,look up threads on this forum about anxiety.they (SSRIs or older antidepressants )didn't work as well for me as I m not wired to communicate and perceive primarily emotionally like neurotypicals(people with non autistic neurology)


Try Copy and pasting sentences you don't understand to a translation service on the internet instead of stressing about there meaning !.

 

[Bolletje]

I’ve been on a lot of psych meds, because I have the dubious honor of having anxiety and bipolar disorder besides Aspergers, and I’ve found that most of the meds I tried don’t really work as intended. Either that, or the side effects are rare, severe or both. It’s why I’m currently managing my disease without medication, under supervision of my psychiatrist.

 

[GrownupGirl]

The many anti-depressent meds I was put on in the past before I was diagnosed have done very little if anything for me, and have given me awful side effects that made me barely able to functional at all. They were mainly prescribed to help me control my temper and or have not irrational thoughts. Yeah right. The entire world is so full of moronic human beings I'm lucky I'm not out there strangling them right now. I guess all I need for people in the world to smarten up and have some intelligence is to swallow some pills! Because of this, I have nothing but hatred and mistrust for psychiatrists.

I don't believe in herbal medicine either. I wish. No, just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's safe or effective. So I guess I'm screwed no matter what.

 

[SusanLR]

I've probably tried all the older antidepressents and they each had their own miserable side effects.
None made me feel better, only worse.
The only meds I found that work and doesn't have side effects for me was Xanax or Ativan.

It isn't just the psychotropics that doesn't work right, many other drugs have odd side effects.
I have to be very cautious about what I take.
People like these "twilight" sedations for surgical things and the main two that are used, Versed
and Fentnyl, just throw me into immediate panic attacks.

Things that are supposed to relax and help sleep such as simple Benedryl, keep me up all night
feeling like I could jump out of my skin.
It's like most everything creates the opposite effect that it is supposed to.

Seems most on the spectrum have odd reactions to medicines.

 

[Anaaewp]

SAME! I don't trusts psychiatrists at all. I've been to 4 different ones and they all insisted I should keep taking the meds even though I told them the side effects were unbearable. Some people told me it was my fault that the meds didn't work, that it was because I didn't want to take them. My diagnosis came from a neurologist who, ironically, could tell right away that I was autistic.
Honestly I never took herbal medicine before, but I really wish it worked =/

The many anti-depressent meds I was put on in the past before I was diagnosed have done very little if anything for me, and have given me awful side effects that made me barely able to functional at all. They were mainly prescribed to help me control my temper and or have not irrational thoughts. Yeah right. The entire world is so full of moronic human beings I'm lucky I'm not out there strangling them right now. I guess all I need for people in the world to smarten up and have some intelligence is to swallow some pills! Because of this, I have nothing but hatred and mistrust for psychiatrists.

I don't believe in herbal medicine either. I wish. No, just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's safe or effective. So I guess I'm screwed no matter what.

 

[LunaticCentruroides]

So there’s a list of things I took over the years that made many of my symptoms disappear, also my other mental illnesses. Always depends on what you want to solve.
I would generally suggest to go make a blood test for testing all the nutrients and maybe also your hormonal balances. If something’s missing, you correct it.
I don’t want to write down the other suggestions here... if you have a specific question you can PM me..
I personally never took medication, not even for any of my other mental problems. Better to treat the actual problem instead of the symptom….

 

[4gottenLoreKali]

First of all, let me say that I am in full solidarity with you as you try to attain some semblance of stability, which we all need and deserve. From what I can tell you've been through a lot, and screwed over many times by people who claim to have your best interests at heart. It's high time you enforce your boundaries and self-advocate. Just remember: anyone who claims to "know what's best for you" better than yourself is an utterly dangerous individual who you need to run away from ASAP.

In the meantime, try to develop a self-therapy regimen that works for you. Personally, mine consists of tons of edgelord tunes, gory FPS games, social media contact with my partner and platonic comrades, and uhhh, "the Devil's lettuce". When you find a therapist who gives a damn and listens to what you have to say, then that's all the better. I'm a living testament to the power of a good talk therapist... but at the end of the day, it's the patient who should decide what works best in their recovery plan. They have to ask lots of questions and do their homework to find out all the resources at their disposal, and I get that can sometimes be overwhelming. But it sure beats the alternative of having some kind of "treatment" imposed on you without you getting your say.

I'm not anti-med per se; my father's on blood thinners for some pretty scary pulmonary embolisms he had a few years back, and yours truly takes Levothyroxine for hypothyrodism, and Metformin for a recently-diagnosed case type II diabetes. Every body (and everybody) is gonna react differently to different drugs, and what works wonders for one person may totally screw up another's life. This is all the more reason why communication and transparency with your doctor is crucial.

While we could be developing more effective drugs if we were under a less dehumanizing economic system, my biggest issue is not with meds for physical ailments. It's with psychoactive ones, namely SSRIs and so-called "aNTi-pSyChoTiCs".

Personal experience, along with that of friends and family members, confirms that these insidious poisons only further aggravate people's mental health issues, among other horrendous effects. Like amputating a person's imagination, chemically castrating them, and making men grow breasts.

I've already gone in-depth elsewhere on this forum about my animosity toward the modern-day eugenics practitioners called psychiatrists who prescribe anti-psychotics like M&Ms, and what happened to my uncle who was on lithium. I'd rather not revisit his tragic story here.

I will, however, relate my horrendous experience with a med called Risperdal, which was prescribed to me in a situation extremely inappropriate from its intended purpose. Given how my account will use such bitter, cynical, nihilistic language, it will undoubtedly prove triggering for some folks out there, so I'm spoiler'ing it accodingly...

Spoiler: Trigger warnings for weeks

In the late summer and autumn of 2018, my mental state was an utter wreck to say the least. A cluster of intersecting factors contributed to what some might call a "psychotic episode". Except it wasn't.

I wasn't running around the streets naked screaming "I'm God", I wasn't smearing my own feces on the walls, and I never have hallucinated once in my Goddamn life. Only someone experiencing those symptoms should be prescribed an anti-psychotic.

It was a nervous breakdown, through and through, and one I have recovered from, fully. I don't wanna get too much into it, but one of the myriad factors that triggered this breakdown was me not taking my thyroid med for several months because I was unable to transfer it to my local pharmacy.

During this "episode" I couldn't sleep for about five days and was unable to keep down any meals. During this time I also had (operative word: HAD) a friend in whom I confided about all these issues, and she believed I was undergoing a "manic episode" and demanded that I go to my local ER. Being too weakened emotionally to take issue with her, I went along with my torture. The only delusion I was under this time was that I thought I actually was going crazy.

Once my thyroid levels were stabilized at the local hospital, I was promptly transferred to a loony bin. In that cursed second half of 2018 I endured not one but two harrowing, degrading, and downright traumatic inpatient mental hospital stays of two weeks each, give-or-take; neither were exactly picnics. The second was by far the worst, but the first was when I was misdiagnosed with Bipolar I ("WiTh pSyChoTiC FeAtUrEs") and thus prescribed Risperdal by some completely useless, domineering amateur of a shrink. He must've been fresh outta med school, and just itching to live out his Josef Mengele fantasies. I wasn't treated like "just a number" by him and his hospital - but a minute fraction of one. Let me tell you about some of the effects of this so-called "med":

• There was an impenetrable mental fog between my intent to perform an action, and my body's ability to actually execute a task.
• Any emotion in any which way was absent from my mind, save for abject despondency of course, and the overwhelming urge to rip all my skin off and vomit my soul - compounded by the aforementioned fog. Fun times!
• Some days I slept 16 hours, other days 3.
• My creativity, which is just about the only thing I got going for me, was utterly smothered and gutted. Guess wanting to finally write my novel is considered a psychotic symptom huh...
• I kept getting these mini heart attacks, but heeeeeyyyy, that's the price you sometimes gotta pay in pursuit of some fabled "sanity" amirite?!
• I genuinely thought I was developing some form of early-onset dementia. Thankfully I was proven wrong when I stopped taking it...
• I gained like 20 pounds in a single week. I talked to someone else who was on Risperdal; she gained 50 in that same amount of time.
  
• I even felt something resembling transgender dysphoria - but it was more so this pervasive need to escape my body and start over; become a completely different human altogether, free from all of male Baphocletian's petty concerns.
• Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, I was not able to ehh, "achieve climax" for the life of me, and on the rare occasions when I could bust a nut, absolutely zero feelings of pleasure washed over my brain that typically comes with that. If a med renders me unable to enjoy my all-time favorite form of therapy, then I might as well just inject krokodil into my member and be done with it.

Risperdal has a "black box" warning from the FDA. Its list of adverse effects is so long that it comprises a whole Wikipedia article - distinct from the main page about Risperdal itself. It is commonly used to "treat" autism by clueless, smothering "parents" just so they can shut their kid up in hopes that they'll fall in line. Oh, and I almost forgot: Risperdal just so happens to be the med infamous for making men and boys develop that aforementioned chest deformity.

Honestly, I'd rather just save up for breast implants!

So yeah, there's my shpiel. I would like to humbly apologize for making it about myself, like I always do, and that my word vomit was so corrosive. I hope a couple of you were able to gain some insight or at least catharsis outta it.