Mental healthh

So, today my grown daughter was diagnosed with moderate to severe anxiety, and mild symptoms of slight bipolar disorder. Admittedly, my first reaction was to not even blink, or breath. The stigma we as a society have attached to mental illness (myself included) is almost as bad as the plague, or aids. I worry about a lifetime of daily medication, but everything is a trade off of sorts. Is it better to be on medication, which enables you to have a happy healthy productive life of some normalcy, or, is it better to be medication free with the reality of never being able to have a complete full life at all? 

I have always been an advocate of not supporting the pharmaceutical companies who have turned us into a generation of pill addicts. Drugs are altering our lives, minds, and bodies. A number of years back I suffered tremendous physical trauma which lead to mental trauma after a severe accident left me the prospect of multiple years of reconstructive surgeries to the repair damage in small doses. At said time, I had to be kept calm, so, lawyers and doctors had me on a regimen of 'off - label' use pain management, which also had the 'on label use' of calming me down.

 After nearly two and a half years I took myself off of the medications through a matriculation of three months of withdrawal from any and all drugs from my body. It was against doctors orders, lawyers orders, so I got rid of all of them too, while I was at it. I figured doctors and lawyers would be easy enough to replace, and I was right, they were. There was a whole line of them waiting in the wings to jump in to my case. The thought of being on medication for the rest of my life scared the fuck out of me. I had previously been the poster child for health, fitness, and yoga and running, so this reversal was really screwing me up. It turns out; it was the best decision I ever made, that, and leaving my first husband. 

Perhaps, I have become jaded from my own personal experiences with "head doctors,” as they held me over medicated,and, at times. zombie - like, instead of allowing me to go back to my usual method of dealing with stress or pain (which was to run, walk, and perform yoga). On legal paper turns out, a client reduced to drug therapy earns you more rewards in a courtroom, then a healthy fit, I can handle this type of female. SO, they had their interest at heart, not really mine. Thus, in becoming jaded, maybe I need to step back a bit, and realize, not everyone is of the same make - up.  Some of us need the help of the professional world to help us get through, either because our brain's chemical levels are unbalanced, our mood swings are chemical, not always female hormone based...or maybe, our sadness and instability is not something we can just jump hurdle over ourselves.

 All of us are entitled to be happy and living complete full lives...in saying that, maybe I need to accept the fact that my daughter is one such person...she needs the help of a daily medication to keep her life on track....but, admittedly,  when it touches so close to home, it alters you. I hope in two weeks or three weeks, she finds herself to be a new person, the person she had always dreamed she could be.... leading a productive happy life...even, if it means, two small daily pills helps her to get there. A complete happy full life beats the alternative hands down. I just hope the psychiatrist she is seeing does not turn out to be the pill pushing therapist/ doctors I had in the past...I hope they are minimalists, giving only the amount needed to her to get her over the hurdles of her diagnosis.