Regarding side-effects of psychiatric drugs

Dear reader,

I am glad you found my answer to your question of, “When taking Carbamazepine I have heard it said to only have bottled water to avoid chlorine that that may interacts with Carbamazepine – is this true and important?” As you say, it is worth sharing these thoughts on Carbamazepine and other psychiatric drugs, as others may also find this discussion useful so I will post what I was saying here:

Answer:

It is worth looking at the side-effects of carbamazepine in the link below. I have heard hundreds of stories of weird interactions like the one about chlorine and carba… These may or may not have some truth in them but 99% of the time such ideas are trivial. The drugs are toxic so, in the very long-term, the more we take the sicker we get.

How to help your mum?… The food she is having is likely to be cheap rather than good, so maybe check on what supplements she is having to make up for some of the deficiencies. E.g. Any sort of omega-3 supplement? Omega-3 being good for the heart, brain and joints.

Drugs

All drugs have lots of side-effects. A simple way of looking at psychiatric drugs is that they are;

• intended to make us less anxious and therefor have to…
• cause us to have less energy
• this requires them to be toxic
• and so they cause just a little damage with every dose

It is the less energy bit that explains how they work. If you think of a mood map, then less energy takes us down and out of the anxious quadrant and into the ‘low’ quadrant. The drugs work when the dose is low enough to take the edge off the anxiety such that we can;

• better explain our troubles to a good listener
• listen to good advice from people who have been through similar troubles

The trouble with this approach include;

• The dose is usually too strong (Dr Moncrief writes about this)
• Drugs are used for too long (All were originally intended for short term use by the scientists who created them – but the marketing people know there is more money to be made when patients fail to recover)
• Addiction gets worse with time as our bodies adapt to expect to have to cope with toxins everyday
• Damage is cumulative

These troubles are all obvious, but the other two troubles that make the drug route pretty useless are;

• We struggle to find good listeners
• The health service puts us in front of people who have not been through what we are going through and so their advice is rarely much use

So, when you read the side-effects of carbamazepine… really, pretty similar to most psychiatric drugs. These drugs are never going to be part of a cure unless short-term and matched up with talking (listening/talking) therapies.

http://www.drugs.com/sfx/carbamazepine-side-effects.html

I have to add that it is almost always dangerous to come off any drug quickly. Change has to start with better lifestyle and that usually needs to include better nutrition.