Meds Compliance: The "Problem" Patient, Meds, and Clinician

To make matters worse, they are told they will have to stay on their meds the rest of their lives. These same awful meds.

Is this it? they wonder. A miserable half-life for me? For the rest of my life?

So we go off our meds and predictably land in the hospital one more time. And then we get blamed for being noncompliant.

Ben Franklin defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I suspect he came up with this observation after getting electrocuted in a thunderstorm for the hundredth time.

So are patients insane in the sense that we think we can just go off our meds without having to face the consequences? The short answer is yes.

Are psychiatrists insane in the sense that they really think we’re just going to do as we’re told? With no effort to get to know us, to inform us, to listen to us? Very much so.

Is there a solution? Yes, but there are no easy answers. As patients, we cannot wait for psychiatry to become more enlightened or for a broken mental health system to fix itself. The onus is on us to educate ourselves, to form working partnerships with our clinicians, to make them listen to our concerns, and to hold them fully accountable.

Yes, we need our meds. But we need smart meds strategies, not dumb ones. The best way to ensure a dumb meds strategy for yourself is to be uninformed and unassertive with your psychiatrist.

As for the clinicians I’ll be talking to in a few weeks, I will respectfully proffer no end of helpful suggestions. Think of it as my prescription to them.

I wonder how compliant they will be?