This is the first of a series of posts discussing pharmaceuticals and DID treatment. The purpose is to encourage those with DID to avoid psychiatrists that have already made any kind of diagnosis before they have established any safe rapport with you. Hopefully, it will also provide some clarification in the somewhat muddy field of psycho-active pharmacology and its place in treatment of mental health issues.

I am not against the use of all psychiatric medications. I am very grateful for what modern pharmaceutical science has achieved in relieving suffering, including medication for mental health issues. But I do not believe we will ever solve all mental health problems with pills alone.

My general advice to dissociative individuals, is not to blindly go along with pills alone. Medication alone, without actual psychotherapy, won’t address underlying trauma. Pills may temporarily put out the surface fire so to speak, the symptoms, but they don’t put out the embers burning underneath, which is the unprocessed trauma. Without a doubt, the trauma and the symptoms will reappear so long as the trauma itself is not treated.

If your mental health professional recommends taking an antidepressant, set agreed-upon boundaries for tracking its impact. For example, you might agree that it is being used tentatively. That way you can get a sense of what happens as a result and whether or not it is beneficial. It may indeed help you and often does function as a temporary fix. If it is helpful, use the stability that results so as to take the necessary steps in psycho-therapy to process the trauma. But, don’t accept it as the exclusive approach for your psychiatric problem. Instead,

You have the right, and the responsibility to yourself – including all parts of any DID system, to assess your therapist. A therapist should be interested in you as a person. A chemical cannot express an interest in you as a person.

Assessing your therapist is the first step toward establishing a genuine therapeutic alliance with that therapist. It is that therapeutic alliance that enables your therapist to help and guide you in processing trauma. You can make a therapeutic alliance with a person, you cannot make a therapeutic alliance with a drug.