Compliance and Complaint

Posted on October 17, 2007 in Psychotropics Uncertainty

A brief article at John Gale’s Mental Health Update notes that older psychiatric patients are more likely to take their meds than younger ones:

A study of 32,991 people in the U.S. compared adherence to antipsychotic medication in older (over 60) and younger patients with bipolar disorder. The researchers found that among the older group 61% were fully adherent, 19% were partially adherent and 20% were non-adherent compared to 49.5%, 21.8% and 28.7% respectively for the younger patients.

One wonders about the possible reasons for this trend.

1. Those who fight compliance the most may not be alive by the time that they are sixty due to suicide or self-negligence.
2. Older people may live in nursing homes where they are given their meds every day.
3. People learn from experience if they survive long enough.

Articles like this remain in the back of my mind as I read accounts of people in episode who won’t take meds (yes, there are more than one going through this right now) around the blogging world. There’s not much you can do when someone doesn’t want to do the drugs: it’s more important to reduce your own stressors and keep to your own program. (Oh God. I’m sounding like a Toastmaster!) While I do not know the full circumstances of each and every person going through the combined traumas of memory and chemical imbalance, I do know that years of talk therapy did not help me. Going it alone isolated me, worsened my condition. The thing that eased the pain in the end was allowing a psychiatrist to work with me, to develop a chemical and psychotherapeutic answer.

But I feel sad, very sad, when I see people in obvious torment, screaming about conspiracies against them or about their suspicions of psychiatrists. Each has her or his own cheering section of supporters who will tell them that they are doing the right thing. I can do nothing for them. My hands are full. My own life needs saving from the disease and from the world.