While pharmaceuticals are certainly over-prescribed, it's no lie that they can assist people in coping with daily activities.
However, pharmaceutics is a massive industry, and the drugs that find their way to you inevitably do because the pharmaceutical companies have deals with certain insurance providers to hype their products. You're not being given choices based on drugs aimed at symptoms; you're being given choices based on which pharmaceutical companies have invested the most money in promoting their products.
I've been working with my psychiatrist far too long to think she's feeding me whatever the state or system or whatever shadow conspiracy is paying her to poison me with. It's taken this long to figure out what's been going on, and it's major depression that has been largely untreated since the stimulants were just masking the symptoms. The result has been a down-regulation and imbalance of neural chemicals that is very treatable. I've simply lacked the patience to realize how long it will take to mend.
I don't want to hear anything about false expectations. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I showed up at this institution and the reality was that I had fallen into a self-destructive lifestyle during the interim year between undergrad and grad school, and it left me mentally unprepared to take it on. But I did take it on. I'm only taking two classes this semester (though they are grad classes) and so far I'm getting straight A's on my exams and assignments, but I'm going through hell every single day to make that so, knowing that once upon a time I was a master of the material I'm now finding myself either relearning or no longer getting a handle on.
I'm done with the stimulants, but I'm starting Wellbutrin tomorrow. I'm very likely genetically compatible with it, since it's worked miracles for my father. It treats anxiety, depression and tackles attention issues, too. I need to give it a few weeks to really feel the effects, and at this point it's all I have left.
And before you give me any shit, of course I'm skeptical of my doctors, as I am and should be about every perspective I get on these matters. But given everything I've gone through these past three months, this is the right plan of attack. They even brought in another psychiatrist in the room today in order to lecture me because I was being so skeptical. She told me that if this drug has any severe negative impact, that she'd write me up in a paper that would likely cause the drug to be taken off the market.
