but I am going to rant about it again!
I take two meds for my mental health issues; Xanax, for anxiety and Trazodone for depression.
Each of these meds has been mentioned on TV shows I watch. And misrepresented.
Trazodone was mentioned on NCIS once. Abbey claimed that someone on it would be so knocked out by it there was no way they could have killed themselves. Not necessarily true. Yes, it makes you sleepy. But I take it every night, granted at a low dose for the moment, and still wake up fully as soon as my little man needs me. Perhaps at massive doses you’d be completely knocked out. But I used to take a much larger dose and it still didn’t make me incoherent when woken up from it.
Xanax was mentioned on West Wing. Abbey (heh, both characters are named Abbey. I just realized this!) takes a Xanax in front of Leo. Leo gives her a lecture on addiction and meds, comparing Xanax to Valium. Um, not the same thing. At all. Yes, Xanax is addictive. Yes, you have to wean yourself off it. No, it will not put you into rehab. You see, with Valium, you have to keep upping the dose to get the same effect. This is not true with Xanax. When you find what dose works for you, you can stay at the dose forever and it will continue to work for you. And as Abbey was taking it as needed (a very common occurrence with Xanax) she probably never took more than .25mg. A teeny tiny dosage.
So, listen up TV people. Maybe it makes better drama to give NCIS a reason to suspect suicide was actually murder and to make it seem like the First Lady was going to be a drug addict. But it does nothing for the image of mental illness.
The key word there, you see, is illness. It is an illness. Whether anxiety, depression, MPD, schizophrenia or what have you. The person is ill. My mental illness is just as much a treatable illness as my diabetes.
And I work hard to treat both of them.