Oh yeah!  When I read psych books I get the symptoms they list!  Not kidding.  I am suspectible that way.  I was told that most first year psych students end up thinking they have everything they read in the DMV.  But a healthy person is supposed to have most of those symptoms depending on the time - But not all the time.  So if it the only coping skill, then it is a symptom, but if it just something you could do if needed, it's not.  Or something like that.  I have diagnosed myself with DID, BPD, OCD, and schizophernia, and I have been constantly told I do not have that.  I even thought I had an eating disorder because I can understand the process.  So the doctors say I have some identity issues!  So I would warn anyone who is creatuve and imaginative that reading lists of symptoms can somehow make you aware of them, especially if you somehow want them to be true so you can get help.  I was totally convinced I had bipolar!  I had to learn a new language and paradigm for my feelings when they said it was PTSD.  I felt like I lost my identity and how I understood myself.  Very scary time.

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." -William Blake

Oh, well, Sarsha, this may be it right here, I just wanted to sleep on it and I kind of forced myself away from the computer for a day or so, and then when I can back it there was such a flurry of activity here that I couldn't catch up with it in one night.  I will try to make this brief and clear but I am not 100% clear on a number of things, so it may not work...

I have 2 psychotic breaks in my history.  Most recently I have been on antidepressants for 10 years, and I was on Zyprexa for 6 yrs and came off of it last summer.  I had to replace it with seroquel (another atypical AP) because I couldn't sleep...in March I started weaning my antidepressants, without consulting my pdoc.  I was having terribly insomnia, agitation, and anxiety.  My pdoc didn't make the link with my AD's but I was able to, and I turned out to be right.  When I lowered the dose, I noticed the agitation subsiding a bit.  When I reached half of my initial dose, I started to be able to sleep through the night without having to take zopiclone and clonazepam in addition to the seroquel.  Now I only take the seroquel at night, which is a huge improvement over taking 3 meds to sleep.

I think my attitude towards medication has travelled in a circle, and I don't have any definite answers...I would never presume to tell someone what is right for them.  For myself I don't even know if meds did me any good or not.  I think maybe it's right at certain times in ones life but not in others.  I think the important thing is not to give up your power.  Don't go to a therapist/pdoc and say "fix me".  You don't seem like that sort of person anyway, but I think when we are emotionally distressed we want help from outside because it seems impossible to imagine it coming from within.  I tentatively think that meds did open a door for me (I'm thinking of AD's here) in that it made my mind move to a different spot.  Because of trauma I guess more than biochemistry, I had been pretty unhappy through life.  I guess primarily, growing up in a cult I was not very skilled at interacting with others in a "normal" way, it was really hard to make friends.  I also had really low self-esteem, and some really crazy patterns that my mind went in, all this based on what my experiences were growing up.  being alone and having low self-esteem = depression.  I don't think it was really a biochemical problem.  However, being on AD's was like being consistently high, and it kind of let my brain know, "there is another point of view you can see all this from."  Not really unlike street drugs, in a way, except I was able go to work and function, for a while anyway.

I tentatively attribute my 2nd psychotic break to being on AD's.  This is a documented side-effect, in case you didn't know.  AD's can push one towards mania, and possibly psychosis.  This is a known fact, but in my own case my pdoc seems really unable to be critical of the drugs she prescribes.  My first psychotic break was when I was 23, and then I didn't have my 2nd one until I was 35, even though I was not on AP's in the interim.  My pdoc called it psychotic depression, even though I don't remember being depressed leading up to it, and I was depressed and stressed out frequently in the 12 years between PB 1 and PB 2 without showing psychotic symptoms.  However, at my 2nd psychotic break I became acutely psychotic and paranoid, and so we didn't really discuss it, I started taking zyprexa then, this was in 2003.  I stayed on zyprexa until a year ago.  This drug seems really good at muting things.  It muted my emotions, and muted side effects I was having from AD's, and it has a difficult withdrawal, based on my experience and stuff I have heard.  I know it is what you are taking, and your experiences with it may not be the same as mine, but I still want to say that to you.

I think therapy has always been difficult for me just based on growing up in  a psychotherapy cult and being abused in that context.  Although initially I was resistant to the idea of psych meds, in the end I was susceptible to the idea of emotional problems as having purely biochemical origins and solutions, because it was also a way to kind of flee from my childhood, and avoid re-creating familiar dynamics with a therapist.  I think this is a difficult situation for most therapists to work with, too, which Awen has touched on.  They think if you have a difficult emotional reaction to there behaviour it's kind of something wrong with you, but in my world it's pretty rational.  My abuser had in his file cabinet a series of drawings I was made to do at age nine.  I think it was a standard psychology test, performed by a man in the cult who was a trained psychologist.  Draw a tree, draw your mother, draw yourself.  With the drawings were a series of psychological interpretations base on the drawings.  My point is, I don't know to what extent my psychological profile was used against me, to make me very pliable to this person.  This is kind of digressing, but it explains how the medical model, and my pdocs very practical perspective came as a relief in some way.

But now I have come full circle and I am re-examining everything.  My psychotic breaks were attributed to

                 1. drug induced-psychosis (only really smoking an average amount of marijuana)

                 2.  psychotic depression

But those seem just the lazy answers, and I'm kind of getting the sense that different pdoc's come to different conclusions, and at a certain point they feel obligated to come up with a diagnosis, but they don't really know any more than you do.  I am starting to re-evaluate these situations, because if I am going to come off all meds, I have to explain these events to myself in a way other than that I have this permanent instability for which I require life-long medication.  Clearly, I have a predisposition to psychosis, and the trigger may be partly biochemical, ie, street drugs or antidepressants.  But my new therapist did mention that she thinks psychotic breaks usually have triggers, which would connect it to ptsd and trauma.

I feel like a really different person than I was before, and I think I've talked to you about the sense of my younger selves waking inside me, which is different but perhaps related to what you are experience with your Selves, which seem much more autonomous.  I think the psych meds did suppress my selves, or keep them suppressed longer than they had to be, but at the same time maybe this was just a point in my life I had to come to later.  In otherwords, I am now 43 and at a point when I can look back more  comfortably and a lot of things are lined up right in my life so I can do that.  But for me, contact with my younger selves has been unsettling but mostly a return to myself and  so a positive thing.  They do not talk to me or try to take over or sabatoge me.  I think I tried to explore this in another thread here, but I think the post has been lost.  At 33 yrs old when I went on meds I don't think I was in touch with my younger selves, I was just really triggered by romantic relationships in a way that I couldn't understand and control.  When I went on AD's it was because I was very distraught in a romantic relationship, and looking back I can see how this man I was involved with had very, very negative ways of handling his emotions (silent treatment when something I did bothered him) and the problem was not something I should have been prescribed meds for.  I was ready to break up with him when my pdoc suggested them.  Looking back, I don't think this was appropriate, because it's like saying I need drugs to tolerate the situation when in fact I think it was a healthy impulse in me to see that the relationship was unhealthy and needed to end.  We did end up breaking up a year later anyway, for the same reasons.  But I stayed on meds for 10 years.

I need to end this endless post, I could pretty much go on for ever on this topic  because it is something I am newly exploring and trying to understand myself.  I think if you need to use psych drugs as tools in order to hold down a job, for instance, then that seems like a reasonable choice.  I think just to bare in mind, pdocs come in a whole range of abilities, and even the best of them tend not to be well-versed in the area of withdrawal.  And the meds have side-effects that pdocs aren't always willing to acknowledge so listen to yourself and your body.

On this topic, Icarus has been indespensible for me, but I don't think I'll ever have the answer.  I think different things work for different people, and at different times in their lives.  This is maybe easier to see as you get older.  I look back and I'm able to see, oh this works for me now but it probably wouldn't have worked back then.  The truth is, time is a healer.  Things will become muted over time.  This has been true for me anyway.  Don;t know if any of this helps.

Paula