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Comment by chillwaves | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between drugs "working" and drugs solving the problem.

One thing that I am cautious about is the biological guarantee that you will develop tolerance to the drug and will need ever more powerful drugs throughout your life to maintain the baseline of "ok".

I'm glad the medication helps, but it seems like exercise and diet (and other activities) are more sustainable in the long run even if they are not as dramatically effective.

Maybe it makes more sense to take medication on a short term basis to deal with crisis and focus on lifestyle changes for long term success.

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I'm happy finding a mixture of medicine that seems to work for me and has been for a couple years now. It took me over 20 years to get to this point though. Most of this time was just me actually realizing a problem then taking a couple years to actually find a decent doctor.

The problem seems to be that we don't really understand enough about how to brain works and how these medication work with the brain. So many psych meds are like "we don't really know how this works, but we think it might do this".

I think that's why there so much trial and error with psych meds. Plus don't get me wrong, the wrong med can be devastating to certain people. I ended up in the ER a during my trials due to bad reactions.

I still try to exercise and watch my diet. I don't have any studies or anything but low carb seems to keep me more mentally stable.

Interesting to hear about low carbs, I've been moving in that direction because of family history of diabetes on both sides. I still eat some junk food with added sugar, I wonder if cutting out added sugar entirely would help.

The other thing that helps me the most is running, but sometimes I just fall out of the routine.

I agree with everything you wrote, especially about the way medications are dispensed. I did try a medication once and had a bad reaction, have not tried since then but I think about it often.

20 years is a long time to suffer.

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