Coping with psychiatric medication when Autistic

For many of us, medication is a necessary part of life. For a huge portion of the Autistic population, that medication is prescribed by a psychiatrist.

Psychiatric medication can be a troublesome topic, psychiatry itself is a relatively young discipline, and can often be found to be neuronormative in nature. It relies on the idea that the human mind can become ill and require medicine to fix it, and yet no test can definitively prove the presence of this illness in the body. It seems logically absurd, and yet, mental health issues can cause immense suffering.

One of the most stressful parts of taking these kinds of medications is finding the right one. Each person brings a different neurology to the table, so when using psychiatric medications, which by their nature act on the brain, it is important to remember that there is no “one size fits all” approach. Each person will have a different experience with medication, and this issue is compounded when you consider the Autistic population, for whom little to know research is done on the efficacy and safety of medications.

This moves us neatly onto my next point, which is side effects. Autistic people often experience rare or paradoxical reactions to medications in my experience. A recent medication change for me actually turned the skin on my hands blue! This is why I always ask my psychiatrist to take the harm reduction approach of start low, go slow. In other words, start with the lowest reasonable dose, and very slowly titrate the dose up. I find that for me, this has helped me avoid many of the less tolerable side effects, and better tolerate the ones that I do get.

An interesting point raised by twitter user @lilririah is access to food. Many of these medications rely on the idea that people can eat regular, healthy meals. Something that prescribers should consider is that the world over is experiencing a huge rise in the cost of living which is having a huge impact on the disabled community at large. Telling someone they have to eat when they take their medicine can essentially be the same as telling people that they can not take the medicine. When the world is trying to decide between heating or eating, a life or death decision over important medications is not going to help their anxiety.

Once you have overcome all of this, there is the issue of maintaining the treatment. Medication comes with a lot of stigma that many of us internalise, and some people simply do not want the medication in the first place. While personal choice is important, and should come from an informed position, prescribers need to do more to help people maintain a healthy relationship with their medication. When you consider the Autistic and ADHD bodymind, it is easy to see how remembering to take a set dose at the same time every day could become problematic.

Assuming all of this isn’t an issue, there is one more problem I want to discuss. Sometimes medication just stops working. Sometimes we can be stable for years, and out of the blue, we fall apart. It is the unfortunate truth of psychiatric medication. This is why we have to be willing to go over this battle time and time again to stay balanced. I personally struggle with this part. I often wish for a magic pill that would make my psychosis go away forever, unfortunately, that does not exist. Besides, mental health is part of who we are, good or bad, it plays a role in our experience of the world.

Whether your mental health is in a good or bad place, we all have something to give to the world, we are all important in our own way. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you have grown up Autistic, constantly being invalidated and told that everything about you is wrong. I want to assure you that the world is better for having you in it, and the battle is worth it.

Stay strong.