What leads people who are bipolar to continuously avoid medication?

This is precisely the most common thing that brings people back into the hospital. They stop their meds!

The things you mentioned are all usually the reasons--and another is 'stigma'. They simply say that they 'won't be tied down to taking medication everday of my life'.

Well people take vitamins everyday--women take birthcontrol pills everyday--and--as we all get older, there are more and more medicines that we may need to take to survive and live.

Good for you--you respect yourself, your health and well-being--as well as everyone else.!

For some of the reasons you mentioned

Lack of good health care benefits or any health care benefits might result in an inability to obtain treatment or purchase meds

Side effects can be a real *****

Mania feels good in the early stages for many people, like the best high in the world, and meds take that feeling away

Denial that they are actually ill

I stop taking my meds sometimes because I miss being manic, the feeling of being invincible and the adventure you go on, not a care in the world and taking risks, doing things that make so much sense to you. Yet when our mood stabilises, you realise how destructive your mania was. I stop taking my meds every now and again and I always relapse within 2 weeks and end up being hospitalised. The urge to be myself (unmedicated) is sometimes too powerful.

The truth appears to be somewhere between what Alper Tunga says and what psychiatrists say. There are virtually no well-designed studies for bipolar disorder - the studies are all by drug companies. Other studies are small and do not compare against a placebo with side effects and over a long period of time, to know if episodes were prevented. In a lot of studies, people who have been on antipsychotics or anti-epileptic drugs (eg depakote) for a long time are "cold turkeyed" off then, and then some are given a substitute, chemically related drug, and others nothing, and then you see that the people who get the drug do better. But this is because of drug withdrawal - the persons were chemically dependent on the antipsychotic or anti-seizure drug at that point. This effect was seen when thorazine was discovered. It was not known what this drug was good for, so at first, it was tried for (I think) clearing nasal passages (I have taken this drug many times, it does clean your nose out like a whistle). It didn't work out because it was wayyyy too sedating, but when people were taken off the drug, many, many of them went psychotic. These were all people who had no history of mental illness - they were in the study to evaluate the drug for clearing nasal passages. So there is a HUGE problem in drug studies.

Also, docs want to think they are helping, because that is their job ( and most of them do care, I'm sure) and so when a patient gets better (as a natural course of bipolar illness) the doc thinks the drug helped. I know this for sure from personal experience in addition to reading books written by respectable psychiatrists (I just read about drug problems in 2 books, one of the docs was a Harvard psychiatrist, this isn't fringe stuff). I haven't been able to find meds to help me, so i"m in and out of the hospital regularly. But every time I try a new drug & I do better for a few weeks, my doc would say the drug was working. Well, my disability got canceled by my insurance company & I had to file an appeal, so I had to get years of medical records. I went thru them and plotted my moods out on a graph over time, with the meds, and the meds were all USELESS. When my doc said the med was helping, it was spring, when the bipolar naturally does better (a seasonal component). Then I would crash in July again, because it wasn't the drug helping.

Many people with bipolar only have a few episodes ever in their lives. It is very hard to know if a med is helping, and they are very, very toxic, most of them. However, a psychiatrist at bipolarworld, Dr. Phelps, who is now also working at Harvard and also has written a book on bipolar II, says there is a lot of evidence lithium causes neurogenesis (from autopsy evidence) etc.

In summary, you need to keep a detailed mood chart and see for yourself if the drugs are really helping, or you just happened to take them when you would have got better anyhow. And weigh that against the side effect risks, which for antipsychotics is a 4x greater risk of heart attack. Most bipolar researchers are now saying people with bipolar should NOT take antipsychotics long-term, only for crisis stabilization, because too many people are needlessly dying. Also, bipolar reserachers say you should NOT take antidepressants because they are thought to be de-stabilizing, and one huge study (STEP-II from NIMH National Inst of Mental Health) shows they do nothing in addition to "mood stabilizers" anyway.

For me, the drugs don't work (and they don't work for a LOT of people with bipolar) and also, the side effects are very severe. I am unwilling to go without sex the rest of my life, gain 100 lbs, or sleep 20 hours a day, all side effects I have had from these drugs. (well, I only gained 40 lbs, then stopped, but it was still going up and up. . . ) The ECT was horrible too. My life is not at all normal however - I suffer a lot, and am suicidal at least part of the day, well over half the days of my life.

someone close to me is just like that, she's afraid to be labelled a "druggie" and even though she can afford it, she doesn't like the thought of having to be medicated to be normal.

me, i have high anxiety and depression, and i'd kill for some good medication to make feel feel a little normal. [just kidding about the "i'd kill for" thing...thought i'd throw that out there, since i did say i was depressed and all....ahem. o_o]

Basically because those drugs used to treat bipolar are both ineffective in preventing bipolar episodes and very harmful for your internal organs as well as your brain.

Up until to recently lithium was the drug that's widely accepted as the most effective drug in preventing bipolar episodes for decades by mental health professionals. But recent researches showed that there is no difference in episode rates between the ones who don't receieve any drug for bipolar and the ones who regularly receive lithium, and hence now it's become a norm to prescribe combination of drugs (Central Nervous System Drugs--known as mood stabilizers--, drugs that are used in the treatment of epilepsy--despite there is no scientifically established link between epilepsy and bipolar --in1000 times higher doses than they're prescribed to epileptics--, antipsychotics as well as even lithium-despite it's proven that this drug is completely ineffective in preventing bipolar episodes-) for bipolar. Yet, there're no reliable researches which show that they're more effective in preventing the episodes than lithium.

Lithium is a very well-known poison and its long-term use definitely causes thyroid problems (which can be deadly in conjunction with heart problems) and recently there are even reported cases for deadly lithium malignant syndrome; Antipsychotics definitely cause dementia in long term use as well deadly neuroleptic malignant syndrome; Both mood stabilizers and antpsychotics cause irreversible, Parkinson's Disease like neurological problems which can make one's life really very very uncomfortable and unbearable and sexual coldness; Taking antiepileptic drugs in 1000 times higher doses than the doses given to epilepsy patients can cost you all of your teeth in short term apart from causing liver failure and kidney damage (especially in such huge doses) in long term use.

One must have his brain examined before going to psychiatrist for bipolar. In the light of these informations I mentioned here the question that should be asked here should have been why on earth people use psychiatric drugs despite they're ineffective in preventing bipolar episodes and very very harmful to phsysical health of individuals instead.

The psychiatric nurses whom I interviewed during my journalistic researches informed me that no success stories they know of regarding the hospitalized bipolars. Those nurses always accuse that doctors completely disregard their reports on patients. They say that all doctors do is merely to turn the patients into moving plants by drugging them and then discharge them saying that ''they're stabilized now", and as a result they see those same patients all the time again and again in their hospitals.

they stop taking them when they feel better, they feel that the meds will take away their identity.........the mania feels great.........