No-Nonsense Guide to Psychiatric Drugs

Including Mental Effects of Common Non-Psych Medications

De: Moira Dolan

Narrado por: Mark Pruett

Have you ever experienced brain fog, strange moods, or suicidal thinking while on a prescription medication?

Do you wonder if your doctor gave you all the necessary warnings about the mental effects of what has been prescribed?

Do you sometimes think you might not need to be on all those drugs?

Chances are you have not been given the opportunity for informed consent because you were not told what is really known (and not known) about what the drug is doing in the body and brain, its possible side mental effects, what's known and not known about its safety, and the actual evidence regarding how well it works (or not).

Any drug that causes changes in mind, mood, emotion, or behavior is, by definition, a psychotropic agent, regardless of whether it is prescribed in a psychiatric setting. Psychiatric drugs have the potential to cause the very things they claim to treat, or worse. Even common, non-psychiatric medications can have profound mental effects.

In today's assembly line health care with 10-minute office visits, often with only a non-physician assistant or nurse, the quick fix of dispensing a prescription almost never includes a thorough discussion of the factors you would really need to make a well-considered decision about accepting a drug. This user-friendly no-nonsense guide empowers the health care consumer with the basics in order to make informed decisions about psychiatric drugs and other meds with unsuspected mind-bending effects.

Dr. Dolan is passionate about patient empowerment and believes being an informed consumer is the only protection against becoming a victim of your medications.

©2015 Moira Dolan (P)2015 Moira Dolan

Just listing a bunch of side effects of drugs

This book started out interesting by giving some history of pharmacology, but then all it seemed to focus on for every individual drug class is just listing the side effects and nothing else. Very biased towards the negative aspects of pharmacological options. I also got tired of basically just hearing the same repeated list of side effects and minimal other information.

Looks solely at the side effects reported.

Thorough look at the side effects. good look at informed consent. I feel it's good to have a book like this as part of a medical education just as a sort of dissenting opinion and a word of caution that adverse reactions can and do occur. So, be careful with that prescription pad.

Very Informative

As someone who has experienced many of these effects from meditations it was interesting to learn about them in this format. I am definitely making changes as a result of what I learned in this book.

Wealth of knowledge to guide one’s actions

Liked having it all in one book. People have to be their own advocate. We have to become knowledgeable and act for ourselves.

excellent

excellent read. personally and professionally useful material. very thought provoking content. I'd love to experience it again.

the author has apparently been wronged in the past..

I am a APRN PMHNP student almost finished with my courses and a nurse for many years. the author appears to have read every fda label on psychotropics and decided broadly the medications are insufficient. dangerous. and a scam.
I will admit that almost all psychotropic are dangerous, that admission is also with almost every single medication you take including supplements. for example eliquis a "blood thinner" increase your chance of bleeding or hemorrhagic stroke. how can evil MDs prescribe something so dangerous. ??the answer is risk per reward... studies show pts with a hx of a-fib. heart attack and stroke have improved outcomes on a "blood thinner".

same as psychotropics such as an SSRI or mood stabilizer. these medications are prescribed to MANAGE not cure people in true psychological misery. many patients in psychiatry have experienced unbelievable traumas.. and diet and exercise won't fix them. psych providers utilize the tools at our disposal to assist a pt manage these symptoms and it is a practice for no 2 pts are the same.

lastly all areas of medicine are not to the level of perfection and efficiency that the broad public may believe. and ofcourse there is misdiagnosis and over treatment and pharmaceutical corruption. but this book and author is so wildly inept and antagonistic that the layman reader may believe all of what this book is saying and think of themselves as informed. it's a tragedy this is on the audible platform.

lastly.. people if your dealing with something. don't give up hope. chin up. find a psych provider you trust, dont allow someone to diagnose you on the first visit.. go to therapy. be informed on medications. take it slow. take it with friends. take it easy.

Uninformed

This is clearly an uninformed author. I have worked in psychiatry for quite some time both as a nurse and a nurse practitioner. We do have objective measures and rating scales and we do have ways to qualify qualify our diagnoses. We also do not make rash decisions on medication and very few times to patients ever experience a lack of informed consent with current standards. It is actually required that patients give consent for prescribing any psychoactive medication. Of course it patient’s ability to be the one to give consent may be a question and at that point we need to have a third-party ask the person to give informed consent but they definitely receive education in every avenue and all of my experience in psychiatric medicine. I spent great amounts of time educating patients. There is some informative information in this book but the author appears to be rather biased against medical professionals. It is sad because this could’ve been a fairy helpful resource to patience but instead it is one that she doubts and suspicion in a population that we have worked so hard to build trust and comfort and care with. This is just rather sad