What Is Mental Illness?
Before discussing about mental illness, what do you know about mental health? How someone could be considered health mentally? Well, when it comes to mental health, you should not only consider someone’s physiological stage only but also their condition emotionally and their social well-being. Early warnings when someone is suffering from mental illness are:
- They are not like they used to be by pulling away from people or activities they used to love.
- No energy.
- Feeling helpless or hopeless.
- Doing a lot of negative activities like smoking, drinking, eating too much or too little.
- Severe mood swings.
Those five points are the most essential sign when a person is suffering from mental illness. The key is finding a professional to help them because sometimes being a good friends or family is not enough to overcome it.
Benefits of Taking Medication for Mental Illness
When someone is showing a symptoms of depression, don’t hesitate to ask a help from professional, no matter how hard they told you that they are ‘fine’ and ‘okay’ because the first thing they do to face their illness is by rejecting the fact that they are sick and needing help. Medication is one of the ways highly recommended to help people overcoming their mental illness. However, medication is not the final solution because medication is only reducing the symptoms and not completely curing the illness but still there are a lot of benefits of taking medication for mental illness as mentioned below.
- Reduces the Depressive Symptoms
Mental illness is indicated by the stage. Some cases could be dealt with without medication such as taking benefits of exercise for mental health but in most cases, medication is essential especially to reduce the depressive symptoms. Anti-depressant is the most common medication prescribed for mental illness, the function is to help balancing the natural neurotransmitter in the brain to manage the depressive symptoms.
- Assists in Controlling the Mood Swings
Severe mood swings could lead to more fatal conditions. Mood-stabilizer is another type of medication other than anti-depressant commonly prescribed to patients with severe mood swings condition. Mood-stabilizer will prevent patients with mental illness to suffer from being too low or too high indicated by being too sad or too happy without any reasons.
- Manages Other Health Conditions that Might Affect the Mental Health
Some studies have been proven that a patient with mental illness may have abnormal level of cholesterol, triglyceride and even blood sugar. However, when those conditions were not treated properly, for example is the too low blood sugar level may only worsen the condition of patients with mental illness. However, as alternative you could take the benefits of eating only fruits and vegetables to balance your mental illness through healthy diet as well.
- Proper Medication for Successful Mental Treatment
There are a lot of stages, solutions and treatment to treat mental illness. However, whatever they are, proper medication is very essential. The proper medication could lead to successful mental treatment because while the patients are overcoming the condition from inside, the medication will optimize the process by balancing or even controlling the chemical reaction inside.
- Helps Patients Having Proper Sleeping Pattern
Most of patients who are suffering from mental illness must suffer awful sleeping pattern. Though there are a lot of side effects of taking too much sleeping pills but in this case, having proper sleeping pattern may help patients overcoming their illness in easier and better way compared to when they have bad sleeping pattern.
- Prevents Worse Conditions Caused by Mental Illness
What happen to untreated patients who are suffering from mental illness? The most fatal condition that could occur is hurting themselves and even suicidal. In most cases, medication is not solving the problem but only numbing the pain or reducing the depressive symptoms. However, though it is working in short term, it still could prevent worse conditions that could occur when those patients are not taking medication at all.
- Short-term Solution for High Risk Conditions
There must be some basic or essential symptoms of mental illness but in some cases, due to some factors that could be the trigger of past trauma that will lead to high risk condition such as panic attack, rapid heart rate or even tendency to hurt themselves, medication could be a short term solution that gives the calming effect to the patients like reducing the symptoms of asthma caused by panic attack.
Cautions of Taking Medication for Mental Illness
Mental illness is not something you could take lightly and in most cases, proper medication is a key to successful mental treatment. However, there are some cautions you should aware when you decided to take medication to treat mental illness.
- There are a lot of studies that are producing non-addictive medication for mental illness because the illness is already bad enough to face and addiction is just worsening the condition of the patient. However, the dependence of taking the drugs regularly is high to treat mental illness. Even if the patient has been declared to be healthy mentally by the doctor, still they need to continue taking the medication for at least 6 months before stop taking it completely.
- Side effects like nausea, diarrhea, headache and anxiety are considered normal when you are taking medication for mental illness. However, each of side effects should be reported for further assessment and whether the medications should be replaced or not.
- The most important thing when it comes to medication for mental illness is they should be prescribed by a professional. Taking them without prescription could be dangerous.
Source: https://drhealthbenefits.com/disease-disorder/depression/benefits-of-taking-medication-for-mental-illness