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By Ina Whether for a chronic or short-term condition, mental or physical, millions of people - including myself - take prescription medications daily. Often, people put little thought into it. Their doctor gives a prescription, they pick it up, follow the instructions, and move on. However, I never had that experience. As someone with multiple chronic conditions that are both mental and physical, I have had to deal with medications not working, adverse reactions, drug interactions, medical history barring me from taking the most effective medications, and even different versions of the same drug having wildly different effects. Managing prescriptions is not always as easy as popping an Advil - which is often done carelessly, especially among American youth. Here I will share four tips for managing prescription medications and finding the right medications.
1. Do your research Despite all pharmacists recommending that you read about your medications before taking them, many people fail to do the most basic research. When you take medication, you most likely will need to change or limit something in your life - certain foods or drinks, alcohol, caffeine, or certain activities. Even something as light as Allegra interacts with grapefruit. Grapefruit interacts with so many meds, if you’re on any it’s better to just avoid it altogether. When researching, get a sense of how your meds work, and what side-effects can occur, and check for interactions with other medications you are taking: prescription or over the counter. If there are multiple medications you could take - say for a condition like ADHD which has short-release stimulants, long-release stimulants, and non-stimulants - compare them to each other. If you are unsure where to start your research, there are some helpful links at the end of the article. Additionally, remember there is a difference between different generic versions of a medication and the equivalent brand name versions. The active ingredients may be the same, but the non-active ones may differ and can affect people differently. Most importantly, make sure you know exactly how to take your medications. Surprisingly, many people take their meds incorrectly. From not following the dosing schedule to not taking the meds with food when you are supposed to, there are many ways to take your meds incorrectly. I once made the mistake of abusing my rescue inhaler to the point of it almost being useless. Had I done my research sooner, I would have known that the effects of albuterol weaken if you take it too frequently. I called a nurse who urged me to go to urgent care, where they diagnosed my asthma and prescribed additional medications to get my symptoms under control. 2. Listen to your body Medications can have nasty side effects, some of which can be dangerous. Many side effects are listed on the packaging and are available online, but sometimes our bodies react to the medication differently from what is expected. Before starting medication, try to get a good sense of your physical baseline - common side effects affect digestion, cognition, awakeness, appetite, heart rate, and others. If you know what medication you will be taking, focus on the bodily systems that are most likely to be affected. Then, when you take your meds, pay close attention to how you continue to feel. If something feels off, reach out to your doctor or pharmacist right away - even if what you are experiencing isn’t a listed side effect. As part of treatment for my allergies and asthma, my doctors tried a very strong medication as a controller. The active ingredient in the inhaler they prescribed me is the same as Flonase, which I used regularly without. However, days into using the inhaler I became severely depressed. I hadn’t noticed the drastic shift in my mood, but luckily my mother was always looking out for me and told me what she noticed about my mood. Once I stopped my inhaler, my mood instantly went back to normal. 3. Be patient, don’t make too many changes at once If you are like me and are on multiple medications or managing multiple conditions, it can be difficult to figure out what to do when something is off. You may not be able to tell which medication is causing it, or if it is an interaction. It is tempting to try everything at once, but doing that means that you will not be able to figure out what is causing the issues. Some medications can take up to a month to work properly, too. In this case, it is best to work with your care team to carefully plan any adjustments to your meds. I recently had to deal with this while managing my birth control and ADHD medications. Due to insurance issues, I had to switch pharmacies. On the generic version of my medication at the new pharmacy, I had more physical side effects and new mental side effects. The side effects were interfering with my life and did not fade away. At the same time, my birth control started to have less effect on my PMDD symptoms. After discussing it with several of my doctors, I switched my ADHD medication to the brand name and planned to shift birth control several months later. Luckily, switching to the brand name made a significant difference. Though more expensive, I am no longer bothered by the side effects of similar generic meds. 4. Remember that medication is often not the only treatment If finding the right medication for your condition gets too difficult or costly, see if other treatments work for you. Medication, like any treatment, is supposed to help you, not hinder you. Sometimes changes in physical environments, accommodations, therapies, dietary changes, and other lifestyle changes can be just as effective as prescription medications. For psychiatric conditions especially, since the medication is affecting the brain, the many possible side-effects often affect other systems in the body. Non-medication treatment also encourages greater awareness of your condition. Most times, you will not be treating your condition with medication alone anyway - make sure to not neglect the other paths to care. I tried to keep my advice as non-specific as possible while still informative. Medications are useful for a wide range of conditions, and millions make use of them daily. Hopefully, if you are one of those million, you now feel more prepared to manage this part of your life. Medication is not something to be taken lightly. It is extremely powerful and can easily cause harm if not used with caution. However, when used properly, medication can help us be free from the conditions that limit our lives. https://www.drugs.com/ is an extremely useful site for finding information about side effects, drug interactions, dosing information, and how to take your medication. It is extremely extensive compared to other sites I have seen. https://www.nhs.uk/ is a generic site but has pages on many prescription medications that give a lot of the same information as drugs.com. It also includes information on how the medications work and all the information is presented in a very reader-friendly manner.
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Did you know that, on average, ADHD is diagnosed in three times as many boys than girls? This is despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that ADHD is less frequent in female than male demographics, only that its presentation tends to be different. Often, girls and people who are AFAB (assigned female at birth) present with greater inattentive symptoms, internalized hyperactivity, and less externally disruptive symptoms. They tend to develop anxiety and people-pleasing coping mechanisms to mask their ADHD symptoms, and their struggles get missed or mistaken. Even professionals fail to spot ADHD in women, girls, and other AFAB people, simply because most information and early research only pertains to young boys with the hyperactive type. My own ADHD went unnamed, but not unnoticed, throughout my childhood and most of my adolescent years. Even still, I know I am one of the lucky ones: once it came, my diagnosis was quick and easy. I lucked out on a psychiatrist who believed me and supported me. I had waited years for a moment when someone would finally look at me and tell me “you have ADHD,” but the moment itself never actually came. After taking an in-depth patient history, giving me treatment for some other problems, and discussing the nature of my symptoms, I was simply prescribed medication. Weeks later I still questioned if I had actually been diagnosed. It’s silly, but it’s something that is so common for those of us with ADHD who are used to our experiences being dismissed. We always question ourselves because that is what the world has been doing to us our whole lives. Yet, as time went on, I realized that the diagnosis was real, valid, legitimate, and something that will influence the rest of my life - possibly as an obstacle at times, but also majorly for the better. Before my appointments with this psychologist, I had already been struggling. Between gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, stress, tense family relationships, disordered eating, frequent panic attacks and sensory overload meltdowns, and recurrent anxiety and depression, my mental health was... a boiling hot mess. But because I was somehow still excelling in my structured activities, no one thought that I could possibly have a neurological developmental disorder. And for a long time, neither did I. They did not dismiss the idea of it, more that it simply never came up. Why should it have? So, I started therapy, which I stayed in on and off for almost four years. It helped me get through the stressful four years that were my hectic high school life with undiagnosed ADHD, but nothing from therapy seemed to make any lasting difference for my mental health or general wellbeing. Despite doing well, I was still struggling. Now that I have that official diagnosis of ADHD - as well as diagnosis and treatment for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), which was an underlying cause of much of my recurrent depression and anxiety - I am in therapy again. Though what I discuss and work on in my current sessions is not so different from what I would do before as far as I could remember, the manner in which we would go through things was completely changed. Before, I would simply discuss an experience, and the therapist would connect it to an idea and coping mechanism. The next week, we’d move on. Unfortunately, so had my brain. I couldn’t retain the information long enough to actually incorporate anything useful into my day-to-day life - thanks, ADHD. Now that I am working with a therapist who understands my ADHD, she gets that I may need more support and close working than with her other patients, she is able to work with me and my brain productively. I never realized how much support I could actually get from therapy until I noticed that I was finally able to progress through my sessions while retaining the information I’d learn in the past. Having a diagnosis, especially for conditions like ADHD, can be a life changing experience. A diagnosis brings along proper treatment, validation, external support, accommodations, and understanding. Though all of these are important, simply knowing you have ADHD - that new understanding of how your mind works - is possibly the most powerful part. Despite the numerous myths and misconceptions about ADHD that plague far too many people, ADHD is one of the most researched conditions in all of medical history! With the internet, so much of that information is accessible right at our fingertips. So learning more about what it really means to have ADHD and how to work with your ADHD brain has never been easier. They say knowing is half the battle: nowhere in my life has this been truer than with my ADHD. In fact, even years before I finally was able to meet with a psychiatrist, I already embarked on this journey of understanding and working with my ADHD. The main obstacle I faced was not that people didn’t know about ADHD, but that a lot of people think they know what ADHD is so they never do any research about it. In reality, they are actually very misinformed, and at times may spread information that is wrong and harmful. Most of my life I had heard of ADHD, but only thought of it in the case of extremes and stereotypes. As I started researching it, however, I recognized much more of the symptoms in me. I am not so impulsive that I put my life in danger, or so inattentive that I do poorly in school, but the symptoms still affect me from my home life to the way I think. And there is so much more to ADHD than what the name or diagnostic criteria suggest. All of a sudden, looking back on my life, everything seemed to make a whole lot more sense. I’d been given glasses for the first time and I could finally see clearly. The great thing about a buttload of information about ADHD being online is that there is also a lot of information about different ways to shift my life to work best with my brain. Slowly over the span of two years I began implementing these informal accommodations, and my life started to feel so much easier. Learning about my brain and why I act in certain ways allowed me to make peace with things that, until then, I had felt were only “flaws.” I was more comfortable with myself, and let myself do what I need to manage my attention and energy. I forgave myself for forgetfulness, and started learning how to organize my belongings in a way that works best for me. I flipped back and forth about whether or not I was comfortable saying “I have ADHD” because I had no professional diagnosis, but I was able to learn much more about my brain and how ADHD affects my life. I recognized that even if I didn’t have ADHD, I can still use any tips that help me, and there’s no harm in that. And any sense of self doubt vanished when all the extensive research I had done to increase my understanding of my ADHD brain helped me get my diagnosis. Every day since that fateful appointment with my psychiatrist, I have been so grateful for my diagnosis. Even though I understood my ADHD brain, the people in my life didn’t necessarily. Post diagnosis, there was an adjustment, and it’s still in progress, but now my parents understand why I don’t seem to learn from my mistakes or their discipline, or how my room can never be organized with everything put away. With medication and proper therapy, as well as the support and understanding of my family, managing the challenges of ADHD has never been easier - in spite of everything going on in the world today. I haven’t taken any formal accommodations yet, but I may when we return to in person learning. And, most importantly, I am still learning about my brain every day. Reading about ADHD and learning how my mind works - how it’s always worked - helps me love myself a bit more and grow a bit every day. For more information about ADHD, check out the links below! https://www.additudemag.com/ https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/index.shtml https://chadd.org/ https://www.adhdfoundation.org.uk/ (Apologies for the U.S. centric list, most of the well established research and resources for ADHD are U.S. based and centered. In fact there is an interesting niche in ADHD research about ADHD in the U.S. vs in other places in the world!)
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Teenagers With Experience is an online organisation created to provide teenagers worldwide with an online platform to share their own experiences to be able to help, inform and educate others on a variety of different topics. We aim to provide a safe space to all young people.
Please note that the content on this website is created by teenagers. While we strive to provide accurate and helpful information, it is important to remember that we are not professional experts. If you are experiencing a crisis or need professional advice, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional or a helpline. |