Thursday 25 September 12:23:52 CDT 1758821032

Psychopharmaceuticals

Psychopharmaceuticals, also known as psychotropic or psychoactive drugs, are chemical substances that affect a person's mental state by altering the brain's neurochemistry. These medications are primarily used to treat mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and by targeting and modifying the activity of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.

Psychopharmaceuticals is a big and unwieldy word so I'll refer them here as psychomeds whether of not it's a legitimate word. The short story is that they use your nervous system to do things to your mind like making you less of some kind of crazy or other. The depression and anxiety and schizophrenia and all that stuff. So if a person is behaving irrationally or abnormally to the degree that said person - avoiding sexist pronouns here - may be a danger to the person's self or the life or health or property of other people (or said person's own mortal existence) it might be deemed advisable by some to administer some chemicals to mitigate that behavior. Are you with me so far?

Some people might go to a doctor - the mental type - and relate concerns that the mental type doctor believes indicate some sort of mental illness and can be fixed with some pills. I've known two or three of such people and they took prescribed drugs and whether or not it helped I couldn't tell - they didn't seem to be having serious problems to begin with but I wasn't inside their heads. That doesn't include the numerous people I knew years ago who had prescriptions for tranquilizers - Valium was popular back in the 1980s and working in an office there were a lot of women taking them. One day one of them gave me a Valium and I don't remember the rest of the day.

One of the people I knew who voluntarily took medications prescribed for whatever the doctor believed she had didn't fare as well as the others and one who involuntarily took them didn't. I'm another one who involuntarily (and unknowingly) took them but more on that later.

Alisyn is not her real name but the rest of this is factual. Alisyn was an only child of two adoring parents who were really nice people. They were wealthy and while not billionaires could have and give their daughter anything she wanted. For all that she was one of the nicest people I have ever known. Her parents owned - among other things - the majority of a small community bank and she worked at the bank. As it happens I knew a good bit about banks and the people who owned them and it was not uncommon for children of whole or majority owners to work at the bank. In some cases it was the common nepo job but some of them were exceptions and Alisyn was one. As a lowly combination of systems analyst and systems engineer - well paid to be sure - I wasn't at her level of society but she treated all people the same - whether bank employees or customers of vendor reps. I was in the bank frequently and spent some time with her on every occasion. Until later.

Later my visits were less frequent and occasionally she was absent from work - in rehab. I learned that she had been taking medications for some time and her behavior had become erratic and disruptive and she had to take time off to recover. To attenuate a lengthy narrative her absences from work became more frequent and the number of pills increased. One of the last times I saw her she had a pill case with eight different pills and she told me how many times she took each one. Eventually she was never there when I visited and a couple of years later I learned of her death at forty-six. That was fifteen years ago this past July. Her death was ruled accidental but having having a dozen or so prescription drugs in you is hardly an accident. Doctors may be prosecuted for prescribing drugs keep rich people on an even keel and they eventually OD but prescribing mind-altering drugs that can do more damage is something they are never held accountable for.

Before I tell you what happened to me let me explain in non-medical lingo what these things do. Before my career was cut short (I had forty years in so know a bit) I was a systems architect. One of those people who design and build those big data centers. What is a data center? Well it's got a lot of computers in it. Computer being a general term for the hardware - there are servers and storage devices and network gear and it's stuffed into those racks in the rows of racks. There may be thousands of pieces of equipment and they all talk to each other and other pieces all over the world and can have thousands of nodes and each is connected to one or more others.

Inside the data center - since it's the brain here - most of the pieces are connected by cables. There may be a few hundred or couple thousand in some small ones and maybe tens of thousands in the really big ones. Hundred of thousands even. They're generally kept in order like this:



In a really sloppy one it might look like this but it would still work - I've seen some like that. Trying to troubleshoot a problem wouldn't be much fun but as long as nothing goes wrong it looks bad but doesn't do any harm.


Did I mention that your brain has eighty-something billion components that all need to work together in order for you not to have some problems? Trouble doing things like eating and drinking and walking and talking not to mention driving a car. Your brain uses a few trillion - depending on how you count nueves - to make your body work and do things like eating and drinking and walking and talking and all the other stuff your body needs to do or you want it to do.

Psych meds do things to your brain and nervous system. I suppose the general idea is that (to the doctor examining you whether or not) you asked for the examination) they aren't working rightand some chemicals are needed to fix the problem. So he prescribes some chemicals and you take them (or they inject them if you are their prisoner and won't cooperate) but either way they get the adjustment chemicals into you.

I wasn't diagnosed as being in need of mental adjustment. In fact I wasn't diagnosed at all as I was effectively in an induced coma after experiencing multiple organ failure and some goofs by medical industry types. After about a month of me not looking like I wasn't going to recover the hospital dumped me in another one. This one was supposed to specilize in recovery and rehabilitation but in my case they had a funny way of going about it.

Apparently while I was non-cognizant I did the usual non-cognizant things patients do - moving when they didn't want me to, trying to get out of the bed, pulling on the plethora of tubes and wires attached to me - so the doctor started putting stuff in me. Not sedatives of tranks (there were occasional some tranks) but psychomeds. Anti-psychotics mostly. The usual list was Clonazepam, Quetiapine, Haloperidol, Tramadol, Olanzapine, and about two dozen non-psych ones. Twenty to thirty drugs in me at once, twenty-four seven for months.

Those five drugs there were in me constantly and another two dozen or so non-psych on top of them. What does that do to a person? Well, I asked Google (I know here are better ones and maybe I'll ask Grok later) and here's the general situation: