Taking control of my own mental health

After two years of letting psychiatrists, mental health nurses and psychologists tell me what's best for me I have decided it's time to take control.

No longer am I just sitting by idly letting them prod and poke me, stuff me full of medications in the hope one of them may work.

It has been about two weeks since I made that decision. It has been about a week and a half since I actioned those decisions. However, let me clearly state that the path I've chosen is not for other people to follow. It is MY path, MY decision and I will walk it MY way.

The decision was one which involved the pharmacy of drugs I was required to take. At the peak of my medicinal intake I was taking anything up to 15 tablets a day, more on bad days. Now, if all these tablets were helping me to some degree (even a small degree) I would gladly have continued taking them. However, the only effect these tablets had were to make my physical health plummet into almost constant distress.

Let's now look at this logically. Part of getting better is feeling better. This feeling encompasses not only mental but physical health. Now, the medications I was taking deprived me of my sort-of-okay-physical-health and replaced it with ill-health. This, in turn, assisted the decline of my mental health to new lows.
All in all this is not a healthy way to feel. I'm sure even the most stubborn person can agree there.

So, with mental and physical health on the decline I weighed up my options. I could either continue getting more medication to hopefully suppress the myriad of side effects or I could slowly stop all the medications and deal with the nasty withdrawals.

A month went by before I was ready to make a decision. In that time my psychiatrist had stopped one medication and replaced it with yet another. I was also admitted to hospital, the psych ward, in part to kickstart the new medication.
During this time my health continued to deteriorate.

Finally, I came to a decision. I would stop taking the medications. I would only take one for the apparent "reflux" (that's a whole other blogs worth of disdain) and one for sleeping. After all a good nights sleep is extremely important.
After careful consideration I begrudgingly decided to take a migraine preventative that my GP had prescribed for me. All up three medications, which is a vast improvement from the ten plus.

I would also like to note, in passing, that I have since stopped rattling.

After only one week, and a half, my physical health has improved rather profoundly. I am still finding some lingering side effects, the dizziness mainly, but even they are becoming less frequent. It should also be noted that the dense ruminating fog that was clouding my brain, and causing me such distress when trying to write, is nothing more than an annoying wisp of fluff that occasionally gets stuck on a jagged thought.
Indeed, both my mental and physical health have been improving and while I'm still crazy (in the nice way) I am finding many situations where I am quite capable at handling them.

Now, in no way am I suggesting that the medical professionals who prescribed all the medications to me were wrong. I strongly believe they helped, at least part of me. In a very real sense they could have given me placebo's which would have had much the same effect (minus the side effects of course). The fact that I knew I was taking them comforted a need for something to be done. It was largely irrelevant that those medications didn't work.

I've come to a point in my journey where I have decided to take control and, as such, it is my decision to monitor just what is being poured into my body. Until such time as I am truly in need of medication I simply won't take them.
Being a realistic person, at least one of my personalities is, I am quite aware that I may have need for medication during darker moments of my life. For now, however, I'm rather enjoying a sense of freedom and a sense of being whole again.