Welcome to Crazy Meds, where you can learn what’s good, what’s bad, what’s interesting, and what’s plain weird and funny about the medications used to treat depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, migraines, anxiety, neuropathic pain, or whatever psychiatric and/or neurological condition you might have. The information on this site is to help you work with your doctor(s) to find the right treatment options. Too many of us get nothing more than 15-minute appointments with overworked doctors or nurse-practitioners, so we need all the help we can get. We need to talk to our prescribers about the best medication1 to treat our condition, and not the most profitable one.

If you know the name of the medication(s) you’re looking for, you’ll probably want our list of drugs by name. There’s also our much larger list of all the meds we know about to treat various conditions, including all the brand/trade names we can find for every med.

We also have the drugs sorted into broad categories with lots of overlapping memberships:

Crazy Meds is the site for the obsessed and depressed, the manic and the panicked, the schizophrenic and epileptic, the migraineurs and bipolar, those with GAD, SAD, OCD, PTSD, in pain or have an otherwise non-standard brain.3

If you have any specific questions about a drug that wasn’t answered on its page, couldn’t find the drug you’re interested in, or want some help in figuring out which medication is the right one for you, then visit Crazy Meds Talk: Our forum for the mentally interesting. We aren’t doctors or anything, and we don’t diagnose, but we have more experience than we ever wanted when it comes to brain cooties and the crazy meds used to treat them. We’re all about helping each other know what the drugs can and cannot do, what they are likely to do for us and to us, and work with our doctors to make the best, or least bad, choice in medication(s) as quickly as possible.

If you’re unsure if you should be taking drugs to treat your condition(s) in the first place, see our all-purpose are you messed-up enough to need medication test.

If you do need to take medication the math is really simple: which sucks less? Taking an imperfect medication that controls the symptoms of a condition that puts your life somewhere in the spectrum of “barely tolerable” to “dear God please kill me now;” or trying to get through life with that same condition which will keep getting worse the longer you go without treating it. A lot of these meds suck donkey dong, but you know what? When you’re mentally ill, and/or have some neurological problem like epilepsy or migraines, and you’re not taking any medications, or not taking the right medications, it sucks syphilitic donkey dong while a red-hot poker is being jammed up your ass.
You don’t think it’s that bad? That’s because you’re reading this site, which is on the Internet. Which means you have access to the resources needed to read it. Have you ever been homeless and crazy? I have. Twice. Have you ever been in the lock ward of a psychiatric hospital? I have. Before Medicare Part D-for-Defraud existed, which was also when all the meds I took were available only as brand, I ran up so much credit-card debt paying for them I had to sell my house. But I was lucky, because:
1) I had a house to sell. Most of the mentally interesting don’t.
2) I also had credit cards, as do many of my fellow bipolar types do. And we often run them to the limit. At least I didn’t buy anything stupid.4
3) I sold it in 2004, so I got out of the real estate pyramid scheme before it all came crashing down on everybody.
And my experiences were nothing compared with the lives of people I saw around me. I’m a fucking poseur when it comes to the syphilitic donkey dong and red-hot poker meeting each other in my stomach. I may no longer be able to hold down a job, a relationship, or be moderately functional more than a few hours a day a few days a week (at best), but I don’t live in a constant state of fear inside of a cardboard box.
So, if you really need meds and aren’t taking them, or taking them sporadically, or if you’re taking completely inappropriate medications, then you had better get ready. Falling into the abyss happens faster than you can imagine.
And it’s no picnic if you’re taking neurological / psychiatric medications when you shouldn’t be taking any at all.

Things like mental illness, crippling neuropathy, epilepsy, and frequent, blinding migraines can’t be dealt with by gentle hugs, prayer and pretty angels, or the fad diet of the week with a basket full of overpriced supplements. Like a lot of aspects of life where you have to make a decision between two options, your only choice is to figure out which one is going to suck less.

Once upon a time these conditions were totally invisible and everyone thought we were making it up as an excuse to avoid whatever we had to do. Now they are visible, more-or-less, on MRIs, CT, SPECT and PET scans, and various flavors of EEGs. Eventually there will be accurate and affordable genetic tests, although that could do as much harm as good. There are also measurable differences in the brains of people who have various conditions vs. those who have none. They are the most obvious in those with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. We’re almost at the point of being able to identify with really good certainty that someone has bipolar or schizophrenia (but usually cannot distinguish between them) based upon the physical characteristics of their brain while they’re still alive. Although there will always be people5 who think we’re faking it, or that we can simply “get over it.” If it were as simple as spraying WD-40 up our noses, wrapping our heads in duct tape instead of tinfoil, and walking it off, don’t they think we’d try that6?

To resurrect my old analogy, these are physical conditions like a broken leg. The above tests are like x-rays, although currently they are extremely expensive aren’t always worth the cost. Regardless, you get your diagnosis and your meds are your cast and crutches. If your leg is totally hosed, your meds are like a cane and the pins they need to implant, both of which you’ll probably need to have for a very long time, if not permanently. And just as you need to explain the cane you need to help you walk and the pins when you go through metal detectors or get an MRI, so too must you explain your condition and meds at certain times in your life.

We deal with the cerebral equivalent of broken legs. Physical conditions, not purely psychological ones, that are treated with physical methods: drugs, surgery, or electromagnetism.

We recognize that there are legitimate, and highly successful ways to treat serious neurological and psychiatric conditions that don’t involve medication. Lifestyle changes can do wonders for preventing migraines. Talk therapy is one of the best ways to handle depression. Specific types of prescription iron supplements are all some people need for restless leg syndrome (RLS). These and other non-medication, but still non-placebo treatments are all a lot of people need. If you think they might work for you, that’s great. Crazy Meds is by and for people whose conditions respond only, or primarily to prescription medications.

1 Or legitimate non-drug therapies such as the vagal nerve stimulator (VNS) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

2 AKA Bi-polar or bi polar for those of you who are still in denial about having it, or how bad it can get. Severity and presentation are spectra of the condition, but it has one spelling: bipolar.

3 Or anything else treated with the medications covered on this site, e.g. plumbing problems like IBS, ED, PE, and incontinence.

4 Unless you consider meds with slim-to-none odds of working stupid. But Mouse was quickly running out of options, and slim-to-none was better than giving up. About twenty years before that, and soon before I was diagnosed as bipolar, I bought fifty acres of undeveloped land in Australia. Take it from me, that sort of thing won't save a shaky marriage.

5 All too often they're family members or employers.

6 Please don't try that. The combination of WD-40 and duct tape can fix a lot of things, but not brain cooties.

Page created by: Jerod Poore. Date created: 15 September 2010 Last edited by:

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