I landed by chance on a U.S. website called ASKPATIENT.COM. This site is quite interesting and at the same time may seem absurd because it lists all the opinions on drugs. Patients record their medication!
It is obvious that the strength and especially the molecule acts differently on each individual. Take 200 mg of Lithium per day is not the same thing to take 1500 mg.
However, it is true that the fear of side effects remains the main reason for patients to abstain from taking drugs. Some have no choice, if other, and sometimes opt for CBT, psychoanalysis, alternative medicine. This is the case cyclothymic.
As I wrote in my book on creativity and cyclothymia, I have not had a real need to take drugs, but maybe one day I will be forced and I do not have problems .
For me the question is how far I can deal with my strength willingness to get out without therapeutic help. The price is high, I admit. But I'm used to 20 years because I'm very disciplined about healthy living but also on my personal ethics (including professional). This saves me but I can not say I'm happy but I do not care because I find offsets.
Once again, it's a personal question and I hate all the people who force you to take drugs than those who try to dissuade you. This is a personal matter and especially for cyclothymia. However, we must assume in both cases did not complain. Mostly it's that rattle around or rejects the bipolar-manic and think it is sick when in fact it is often in a bad environment (goodness of fit). 
Psychiatrists as David Healy ("The Time of Antidepressants" or his article in Courrier International No. 820) are critical of certain drugs taken for long periods. Most doctors often assumed that cyclothymia is a neurosis, hysteria or borderline, and finally it's not so bad compared to real bipolar ... This is obviously false because the harmful effects and invisibility of cyclothymia are far more dangerous than the BP I, well cared for.
By cons, Healy may be right when he speaks of "pharmaceutical marketing", referring to the campaigns to encourage take drugs because it is ultimately the laboratories that fund these actions. This is called DISEASE mongering. At the same time if this helps diagnose new cases and what is wrong? We face a complex situation.
It's amazing that with the same molecule, each patient reacts differently ... We therefore also perceives the limits of science to treat mental disorders because the brain is a very complex!
What I find interesting about the approach ASKPATIENT is the democratic, transparent and ultimately cathartic this site. People talk about their disease free and they do not live as we do under the influence of the environment and therapists (who often do not know what they treat). The "patient-pattern" exists in the United States, France will have to wait at least 10 years ... We must remember that freedom is a real value there and that here the principle of equality prevails despite hypocrisy that means.
Personally, I think that if society was less selfish, materialistic, rigid and if people were able to truly love, there would be fewer psychiatric consultations. This may sound naive and simplistic but I think it's a reality. I reread last year's wonderful biography of John Nash not Silvia Nasar in which the Nobel Prize said that without the love of his wife he would never do it out (its schizophrenia).
For the bipolar case lighter, people are turning to doctors because they annoy those around them or they hate themselves or are unaware of themselves ...
Drugs should be a temporary means a crutch to get through the SOMA and not a new concern as the Professor Kramer in the "Order of Happiness."
As I wrote earlier we enter the era of a new eugenics that TS Eliot in 1939 called "the puritanism of a legal officer in the service of efficiency" (see also Alain Ehrenberg and " Tired of being self ") and medicines no longer represent a danger to the body (the side effects are less and less real with the new generations of molecules) but to the spirit and moral integrity.
In this context I share many principles pharmacological Calvinism advocates who believe that suffering is the idea of constructive we want to ban. So says Professor Dyck, a specialist in bioethics at the University of Harvard, or Dr. Tixier (Praise of the Depression that I mentioned in a previous post) and Peter Kramer: http
: / / www.cbhd.org/resources/endoflife/dyck_2003-11-12.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listening_to_Prozac
