What are all these drugs for?

Sometimes I hate getting up and taking my drugs. I have a hand full of pills, all difference colors, that are chalky and gross. I choke them all down at the same time to get it over with. I'm on an anti-depressant, mood stabilizer, anti-psychotic, and whatever the hell Abilify classes as nowadays. If I have any more anti's I'll probably have to start taking a pro.

So what do all these drugs do? Well, the anti-depressant is an SSRI, which as we talked about earlier, helps regulate the serotonin in my brain, making me not so depressed. The only trouble is, in people with bipolar, too much serotonin makes us crazy manic. So I take the mood stabilizer which seems to, you guessed it, stabilize my mood somehow. I've been reading around, and it looks like they don't know how it works either.

The other, an anti-psychotic, helps deal with my super crazy side where I start seeing fairies, not sleeping, and wanting to jump in front of subway buses. It keeps me from getting insane. I try to only take it when I'm nuts, because it makes me sleep for days on end when I'm depressed. When I'm manic, I get about 4 hours out of it. It's also great for panic attacks.

Aripiprazole (Abilify)is also used with an antidepressant to treat depression when symptoms cannot be controlled by the antidepressant alone. Aripiprazole is in a class of medications called atypical antipsychotics. This is good stuff that seems to work fast. When I was in my depression, my doc upped the Abilify and everything was suddenly better.

So each one has it's purpose. I wish there was a multi-vitamin type pill that I could take which just worked on everything. Luckily, all my drugs have minimum side effects, except "the lamictal headache" which I have almost all the time. It's getting worse since I've been taking my meds at different times during the day. That's a problem I've got to remedy.