How long has your child been seeing the psychologist? One additional option is to see if another psychologist might have other ideas that would help. There are different approaches and some are more effective than others for a particular individual.
I don't want to make the decision more difficult for you; I know considering medication is not something that you are doing lightly and I take these illnesses very seriously. I also know people who have taken medications for similar reasons for many years and who have felt the medications were very helpful. So I am not anti-medication.
However, I personally wish I had never tried them. I actually took an SSRI for 10 years and spent much of that time wanting to quit, but found that no one was supportive of that idea. I ended up discontinuing the medication myself prior to pregnancy and have not taken SSRIs since (over 10 years now). It was a very slow and difficult process. I feel like cognitive behavioral therapy gave me tools that have been helpful in the long term in making permanent changes that made dramatic differences. I don't have anything positive to say about my experience with medication.
If you would like to know more about why I disliked the experience, I'd be happy to discuss it via private message. The main thing, though, is I think that there is a tendency for doctors to underplay the difficulty of discontinuing the medications as well as other possible complexities. There is a recent paper discussing how the number of receptors decreases as a compensation and that this may (or may not) have long term effects on susceptibility to depression. One research paper isn't the full story, of course, but my impression is that most doctors and psychiatrists (at least those that I have encountered) underplay these issues. The exact biological basis of these disorders still isn't clear and the evidence for the effectiveness of these medications is more conflicted than one would think from their ubiquity. As a biologist, I can explain more if anyone is interested, but don't want to belabor it.
So my thoughts are that medications may be very helpful for some people, but that it's important to get good information about what to expect. I have actually been thinking I may need to consider them for my daughter at some point because she is in therapy that is not helping sufficiently. However, I would only be willing to work with a psychiatrist who was willing to discuss the costs and benefits in detail to help in the decision. Maybe I have just been unfortunate, but the doctors I've encountered (both as a patient and informally) have focused on the benefits with very little information on costs.
I'm sorry for the novel, but I have thought about this extensively over the years and try to keep up with the research because of my interest.
Last edited by apm221; 03/12/15 12:29 PM.
