What are Psychotropic Medications?

Psychotropic medication is prescribed when psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, based on psychiatric evaluations, see that the symptoms can deter the use of other treatments or therapies. These medications affect the brain chemistry known to directly impact mood and behavior. While most patients and their families would prefer that no medications are used in the process, there are occasions when medications are necessary and useful.

Medications Can Help Overcome a Challenge

These drugs have been formulated to affect the chemistry of the brain, enabling them to function more normally. If you are struggling with paralyzing fear, the relief that psychotropic medication can help you overcome that gripping symptom that may prevent you from accomplishing daily important tasks. If you are too depressed to get up from bed and face most mornings, it can give you the momentum to jumpstart your day.

The Right Medication Can Provide Stability and Safety

If you are stricken with a severe case of mental condition, such as schizophrenia, and in danger of harming yourself or others, you’ll benefit from psychotropic medications. The medication can stabilize your thoughts and prevent you from causing harm to yourself or those around you. However, you will need close supervision and monitoring to note improvements, as well as side effects. Changes are bound to happen; these may require a change in the prescription in terms of medication, dosage or time interval within the treatment period or in the course of a lifetime.

Medications Can Support Other Treatment

There are psychiatric conditions that are treatable, but may require the combination of other therapies. Such would be difficult to administer when you are in a stage of “psychiatric crisis.” Medications can stabilize your thoughts and moods so you’ll be able to make a progress in your other therapies. If you have a treatable condition, you can look to better days with medication combined with other therapies. But first, it is important to make those therapies possible.

Right Prescription and Monitoring

Psychotropic medications may or may not treat psychological disorders for good, but they can make you feel better, making treatments and therapies possible. Without medications for some psychiatric issues, getting better may be impossible. The case may even spiral into more severe and disabling symptoms. Many people’s lives struggling with mental/behavioral conditions have been changed with the right medications and monitoring.

This is why you need a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse practitioner to help you get the right prescription, to be medically managed and monitored, and so you’ll be able to live a fulfilling life. This is what Living Well Behavioral Health in Knightdale, NC on McKnight Drive expertly does. Make your first appointment, your first step to right psychotropic medications and more satisfying life.

Psychotropic Medications are to Help INCREASE, Not Decrease Ability to Function

Psychotropic medicines are compounds that affect the functioning of the mind or the mental processes through pharmacological or chemical action on the brain. The use of these drugs can be necessary when a psychiatric health issue is causing significant impairment in your normal functioning. These include antidepressants, tranquilizers and hallucinogens.

The primary intent of these medicines is to promote or increase healthy functioning. Yet, some of these psychotropic medicines may pose risks because of side effects. This looming possibility underscores the importance of medical guidance from a qualified professional, such as a psychiatrist or a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

How Psychotropic Medications Work

Psychotropic medicines work by altering or balancing the quantity of essential compounds in the brain called “neurotransmitters. There are certain psychiatric conditions that respond well to these neurotransmitters, namely serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine that control thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

For instance, antidepressants (agonists) can increase the levels of your serotonin and norepinephrine, so your mood is stabilized. Neuroleptics (antagonist), on the other hand, may inhibit or block dopamine, which is unusually elevated in people with schizophrenia. Psychostimulants are drugs that can function both, as an agonist or antagonist and are often used to manage ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). These function by stimulating dopamine and norepinephrine to suppress impulsivity, but bolster alertness and attention.

What These Drugs Do

Know, however, that these medicines are not chemically formulated to cure psychiatric disorders. What these medical interventions can do is to allow healthy mental functions to occur so that the symptoms will become more manageable, and so the other helpful therapies can be administered.

There is no doubt that psychotropic medications can increase healthy brain functioning and deliver major benefits in managing disturbing symptoms attendant to mental disorders. These beneficial drugs, however, may also cause side effects. Since these drugs are centrally-acting, the brain is the first organ to be impacted if any of these drugs is abused or misused.

Achieving the Optimal Functioning

Monitoring how these drugs affect you is critical during the treatment period. Certain signs and symptoms are monitored to determine if you are responding to it well, or if you are showing indications of adverse effects. While the purpose is to increase your ability to function, the dosage may have to be regulated or modified, or the drug is altogether changed, when the desired results are not observed within reasonable time.

Remember, that psychotropic drugs may help or upset the sensitive processes within your brain due to side effects. This is why psychiatric disorders need to be handled with extreme caution using psychotropic medications. This is how prescriptions and medication management are handled in Living Well Behavioral Health in Knightdale, NC on McKnight Drive. Call us so we can talk better about the best medications to help you increase your ability to function.