 Why is there such a taboo around taking medication for mental illness? This is something that puzzles me and it's something I want to explore and something I want to break down a little bit by being honest about the fact that I take medication for mental illness. I have to be a bit honest about it and challenging of myself because I didn't for a long time open my mind to the idea of taking medication for my mental illness. And so I guess that it's good for me to examine what with a barrier is there and what I've been the benefits of doing it. So in this video I am talking personally rather than professionally I'm not a psychiatrist I can't give advice on medication and all that kind of thing but I can tell you about my experience of it and also some of my experience of the response of others to the fact that I do take medication. So in this video I'm going to talk about metazapine which is an antidepressant that I take. I also take pro-panelol and lorazepam and I'll maybe talk about those in a different video but today I'm going to talk about metazapine, the antidepressant just because you might be coming to this video because perhaps you've been prescribed it and you want to know how it's going to feel, how long it takes to work and that kind of thing and I'll touch on some of that too. So the first thing though is yeah, medication. We don't talk about it very much and I reflected on this because I recently got asked, I'd gone and given a talk at a conference and somebody asked afterwards they wanted to know about my personal experience a bit and they said, did I have any top tips for managing states of really heightened anxiety and how did I manage when I felt myself going into panic and that kind of thing and I joked and said well I take a dose of lorazepam and I said it kind of jokingly but actually that's true but it was kind of you know joke, nervous laughter because it didn't feel quite an appropriate response but it's a completely appropriate response. I have medication which helps me and it's okay that I take that if it's going to help me. So metazapine, so metazapine is an antidepressant. Now many people who take antidepressants find that they might need to try more than one before they find the one that works for them. This was the case for me. So I started taking antidepressants about three years ago and my various treatment team had been recommending that I should consider antidepressants having struggled a lot with depression alongside other issues for a very, very long time and they felt antidepressants might help but I was really, really anti-medication. I honestly, I can't even tell you why. I just felt like this was something that was going to change me in ways that I wouldn't be in control of. I'd heard about all the awful side effects. I thought I should be able to manage without it and I think that was probably the key thing. I thought maybe this felt like a bit of a sign of weakness and I feel a bit ashamed to admit that because I would never judge someone else who took medication for any condition whether it was a physical or a mental illness and I would readily take medication for physical ailments and yet I felt I should manage my mental illness on my own and without the need for medication. However, I got to a point where I was willing to give antidepressants go. So I tried a few different ones and I was moved on to metazapine which is specifically good for people with post-traumatic stress disorder and so I was moved across. Now when you start taking any antidepressants, I believe, you start at a low dose just to check that you're going to get on with it okay and then that is gradually increased over time and it's the same when you decide to stop taking it as well. You mustn't just stop. You need to talk to your doctor and look at gradually tapering off how much you take because otherwise you can get withdrawal effects. Now, so I started off by taking 15 milligrams a day which was quickly up to 30 milligrams and now I'm on the maximum dosage of 45 milligrams of metazapine a day and that's something I have been taking for a long time. I used to worry about being on the maximum dosage because I thought, well now I'm taking the most that I can. Where do I go from here? But my psychiatrist always reassured me that actually you can take it alongside other medications if needed, though I haven't needed to take additional antidepressants as yet. So what happened when I started taking it? So something is really important to understand if you're thinking about taking medication for mental illness or you are supporting someone who does is that there's a really difficult bit at the beginning sadly where you start taking the medication and you will experience the side effects and those are usually quite short lived most of them but you'll experience those side effects more or less right away but you don't experience the benefits of the medication for some time. So there might be a period of a couple of weeks where you might be having more severe side effects. So for me actually I struggled with things like diarrhea and feeling nauseous at the beginning that did go away relatively quickly which was good news because I had an eating disorder and trying to get food in was tricky enough without that added jeopardy but that was relatively short lived. Sometimes you can also get increased feelings of suicidality and self-harm so you need to make sure you've got the right support in place in case that happens and then actually the impact so feeling the positive effects feeling my mood lift didn't happen for probably I would say four to six weeks and it's a bit strange because you're not really sure at what moment that happens but I do vividly recall that one day I was walking my dog and I suddenly realized that things felt a little bit easier than they had done and I couldn't quite attribute that to anything and I realized this was probably the fact that my medication was kicking in. Now as with any medication for any kind of illness then you have to get used to when to take it, how to take it and what works for you and like with most medications it works best if you take it at regular times. So for me it's the last thing I take before I go to bed. This is particularly important with a drug like metazepine which unlike lots of other antidepressants actually makes you really really sleepy. So I find it's really good to take it before I go to bed it actually helps me to sleep although it's not a sleeping pill and one of the things that prompt me if I've ever forgotten to take it is that I can't get to sleep and so that will prompt me to take the metazepine. One thing I do find is I have to be really careful if I'm doing things like travelling for work and moving between time zones or if something strange is happening that means that I need to drive through the night for example then I will have to take the metazepine before I finally do make it to bed but it can have a bit of a kind of hangover effect the next morning where I might feel very tired if I haven't had my kind of full night sleep. So you need to think about that a little bit carefully. I was in Dubai a couple of weeks ago and I had to fly overnight and then when I got there the next morning I kind of got off the flight and got on with my day as normal and I ended up taking my medication quite late and there had been a bit of a time difference and so the night wasn't very long and so I did feel the impact there a little bit so I needed to be a bit careful about trying to take it at the regular times. But yeah, so you take it at the regular time it's important to try and get into a routine so you don't forget. You can't double up on a dose if you forget it so it's important that you do try and remember and if you've forgotten you take it as soon as possible and if you're kind of then into the next day then you just go to your normal dose that day. If you miss one or two days it's unlikely to have a significant impact and certainly this has been what I have found is that once I've kind of built this drug up in my system that occasionally I've found that I've left my medication at home for example and I've gone away overnight and I haven't seen any sort of significant impact of that other than that I found it harder to get to sleep that night and I've really worried about the fact that I've forgotten to take my medication but it hasn't seemed to have a big impact as long as I then take the normal dose afterwards. Obviously if you've forgotten to take it with you and you've gone somewhere for a longer period of time then it would be really important to try and get an emergency prescription and get yourself back on track because as I say when you stop taking medications often your body can experience withdrawal and obviously after more than a day or two I'm sure then you would begin not to feel the positive impact that the drug was having for you. So it's true for all medications be sensible I guess. But yeah I mean so I want to talk about it because I'm not ashamed of the fact that I take an antidepressant and also I want to address this idea that we should always be looking to stop taking it as soon as possible so an agreement that my psychiatrist and I had come up with sort of quite early on in my treatment for my various issues was actually that we wanted to get me to a point where I felt relatively stable and then we were just going to let things kind of roll. So there were some medications that I needed to move away from sooner so I mentioned that I take laurazapam I now take that as what's called a PRN which stands for something in Latin that means you just take it when you need it but I used to take laurazapam and diazapam so they're benzodiazepines they kind of make you feel very very calm when you're otherwise feeling anxious and I used to take them like multiple times a day and I needed to stop taking those because they're highly addictive and can have lots of very bad side effects if you take them for a long time so I needed to kind of wean myself off those and the other thing I found is that having not having them in my system all the time means that occasionally when I have a complete meltdown and I need it in order to manage that it is more helpful than it would have been. So yeah so but the point I think I was making was that I'm in no hurry to stop taking my antidepressant I don't see this as a sign of weakness I consider that you know this is doing something to help with some kind of yeah tricky chemistry going on that the antidepressant is helping to correct an imbalance and that actually it doesn't fix the problem so the antidepressant isn't going to get rid of the fact that I have post-traumatic stress disorder it's not going to cure my autism it's not going to cure you know the various different things going on in my life however what I feel it does is it brings me up to a point where I'm just a little bit more able to be in a positive enough frame of mind to be able to do all the other things I need to do in order to help myself. So medication for me enabled me to do things like get calm enough to eat that was the larasa pan rather than the metazepine but to get calm enough to eat to get myself enough out of that depressive sort of fog to begin to kind of get up and get out of bed and get outside and engage with the things that might contribute further to my well-being and help me to feel better. I've been through a really difficult period with my mental health and things are going okay now so I just don't really want to rock the boat so I'll continue to take it and I hope that you know I'm as I say I'm not the most informed about metazepine or drugs in general but I hope that you know if you're thinking about medication that this helps to break down the barriers a bit that you maybe feel a bit less alone in this and that I don't know I don't think this is something we should be ashamed of and I'm sure I'll get some hate on this because some people are very very anti-medication but yeah I am not ashamed of it I don't think any of us should be ashamed of it and yeah I just felt I needed to be open and honest about it so yes yes I take medication for my mental illnesses no I don't think that's a problem yes I think we should talk about it more if your treatment team feels this is something that might help you then I hope that you will consider it and explore what works well for you good luck I hope this was helpful interesting in spite I don't know what I hope this was I find yeah difficult but yeah I hope it was whatever okay okay I'll come back another time when I'm more coherent I hope that was helpful if you would like me to talk about my other medications so I also take pro-panelol mainly for migraines actually it has a whole host of different uses pro-panelol used to take it for panic but now I take it for migraines and also lorazepam which I take yeah as I said occasionally for anxiety and it helped me to get to eat again it got over the fact I was so scared of literally being in front of food yeah help with that if you'd like me to talk about either of those let me know and I'll make another video where I blather on slightly incoherently I couldn't even say the word incoherently ah okay it's time to go bye please subscribe