I wish people understood how most medications worked better. Everything gets boiled down to "adderall is the energy pill" or "SSRIs are the happy pills" and it doesn't work that way at all.

most of these meds just control symptoms, if you're lucky. So they push away the most overwhelming parts of how your brain works so you can be more able to the work necessary to feel better and make changes in your life.

if you have panic attacks, it can be hard to work on anything else, which makes everything worse! Sleep, taking care of yourself, going to therapy, learning strategies to manage anxiety. Because you're too overwhelmed dealing with the attacks.

The meds are just to stabilize you so you can make the changes you want to make. They're not a cure, or a substitute for working on the problems you want to improve.

I don't know whether it's doctors or direct-to-consumer ads, or ableist cultural attitudes that are to blame here, but if you could just take a pill and cure a mental illness, we'd be living in a very different kind of world.

Healing has to take place, learning has to take place. You have to properly contextualize how your brain works and square that with the kind of life you want to live. You can only get that from years of work, not from a pill.