for Depression, Migraines, Bipolar Disorder, Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, & Assorted Other Brain Cooties
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I’ve had to shut down the forum. It wasn’t working properly and exacerbating the server problems caused by LunarPages’ incompetent tech support and the non-existent services for which I paid. I’m suicidally depressed as it is, and I can’t bother to care about much beyond feeding my cats. So if I ever manage to get my act together enough to plunder more money from my ever-shrinking IRA, I’ll move the site to a domain host with up-to-date software and whose people know what the fuck they’re supposed to do.
Welcome to Crazymeds
At Crazymeds we make psychiatric and neurological conditions (AKA brain cooties) our bitches with evidence-based medicine and a healthy dose of gallows humor. We try to explain more about psychiatric and neurological medications than the WebMD family1 and any other site that offers “FDA-approved” information. Instead of what they give you - reformatted for a more advertising-rich experience2, but otherwise word-for-word copies of the same medication guides or prescribing information / package inserts (PI sheets) that often are supposed to come with your meds3 - Crazymeds is where you can learn what’s good, what’s bad, what’s interesting, and what’s plain weird and funny about the medications used to treat depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, epilepsy, migraines, anxiety, neuropathic pain, or whatever brain cooties you might have. We give you details other sites don’t, information that is really helpful for you to work with your doctor(s) to find the right treatment options. Things like:
- How likely a med will work to treat what you have.
- When will it start to work.
- What its pros and cons are.
- How long side effects stick around
- and what, if anything, can be done about them.
Mentally Interesting | Medicated For Your Protection |
You Can Find What You’re Looking For!
If you know the name of the medication(s) you’re looking for, you’ll probably want our list of drugs by names and class/category. There’s also our much larger list of all the meds we know about to treat various conditions, including all the brand/trade names we can find for every med in every country in which each is available4. We also have the drugs sorted into broad categories with lots of overlapping memberships:
- Antidepressants, like Wellbutrin (bupropion) and Effexor (venlafaxine), for the treatment of depression (duh), anxiety, and other conditions.
- Mood Stabilizers, such as Lamictal (lamotrigine) and Seroquel (quetiapine), for the treatment of bipolar disorder.
- Anxiolytics - in English: drugs to treat anxiety and the alphabet soup of anxiety spectrum disorders like GAD, PTSD and OCD. These are mostly SSRIs like Lexapro (escitalopram), as well as benzodiazepines and a few specifically non-benzodiazepine anxiolytic drugs like BuSpar (buspirone).
- Antipsychotics, such as Invega (paliperidone) and Abilify (aripiprazole), to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
- Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) - AKA anticonvulsants - which are used to treat one or more of epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and migraines. Depakote (divalproex sodium) and Stavzor (valproic acid) even have FDA approval to treat all three.
- Benzodiazepines - a subclass of AEDs - like Valium (diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam), which are used to treat anxiety, epilepsy, sleep disorders and more.
- Medications for Headaches and Neuropathic Pain, which are primarily AEDs like Topamax (topiramate) and Neurontin (gabapentin), and some antidepressants, like Cymbalta (duloxetine).
- “Headache” usually, but does not always mean “migraine.” Like every condition discussed on this site, officially or unofficially, headaches are a spectrum disorder.
- Neuropathic pain is a catch-all term for specific conditions such as trigeminal neuralgia (sometimes misdiagnosed as migraines) to chronic idiopathic pain.
- Medications for Adult ADD/ADHD. Mostly stimulants like Adderall (mixed amphetamine salts), but also non-stimulant medications like Strattera (atomoxetine).
- Medications for Sleep Disorders include stimulants, benzodiazepines, and non-benzodiazepine hypnotics like Ambien (zolpidem).
- Stimulants, such as Adderall and Provigil (modafinil), to treat the above-mentioned Adult ADD/ADHD5, sleep disorders like narcolepsy, as well as other conditions.
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Batshit Crazy | Medicated For Your Protection |
1 WebMD owns eMedicineHealth, RxList, Medscape, MedicineNet, and theheart.org.
2 Like I should give them shit about ad-rich environments.
3 If you didn't get that information with your meds, we have it. You can also get it from the drug's official website - which we link to - the U.S. National Institutes of Health's collection of medication guides at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginformation.html , and their direct-from-the-FDA package inserts (AKA "FDA-approved information") at http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/about.cfm . All on one page without any ads.
At least Drugs.com, while they get a most of their content about individual drugs from the PIs and medication guides, also gets and presents info from other sources. Eventually they put up stuff we've had since 2004, like trade names and availability outside of the US, and popular off-label uses. Like most sites they had drug ratings long before I did. They also have the best drug-whatever interaction checker since AIDSmeds took theirs off the air, and generally the best pill identifier I've seen. And they go overboard with a lot of their HONcode requirements like I do. If you can't find what you're looking for here, go there.
4 I wouldn't be surprised if all the overseas trade names I've included for Celexa (citalopram) and Effexor (venlafaxone) are why those meds vanished from Google's search results. Perhaps they thought I was keyword spamming, when I'm actually providing useful information to anyone who might be travelling to those counties and a way for people who bought a med under one of the vast number of obscure trade names available in India and Pakistan to find this site. Leaving me to believe that someone who works at Google is an ableist and/or racist. Well Google, fuck you and your bigotry. I'm not removing them. The absence of the Celexa and Effexor pages from the search results, like the way gmail automatically directs all e-mail from the Crazy Talk forum - and even a lot of mail from my personal accounts - to spam folders, is just more evidence of how, no matter what we do to follow their rules, neurotypical bigots will still fuck with the mentally interesting.
I'm stuck with AdSense because, after trying alternatives, that's still the only method that pays decently, allows me to keep ads all text all the time, and not have to deal with people.
5 Note how I've emphasized the word ADULT. Crazymeds deals with adults. Other than listing a medication's pediatric approvals, warnings about not prescribing a med to kids, and reminding some people how lucky they are to not have children with specific forms of neurological or psychiatric disorders, we don't deal with children. We especially do not deal with kids on the Crazy Talk forum. Parents: you'll need to go elsewhere. I don't have the emotional stamina to help you.
Finding the Treatment Options that Suck Less by Jerod Poore is copyright © 2010 Jerod Poore
| Last modified on Saturday, 03 September, 2016 at 02:40:56 by JerodPoore | Page Author: Jerod Poore | Date created: 15 September 2010 |
All drug names are the trademarks of someone else. Look on the appropriate PI sheets or ask Google who the owners are. The way pharmaceutical companies buy each other and swap products like Monopoly™ real estate, the ownership of any trademarks may have changed without my noticing.
Page design and explanatory material by Jerod Poore, copyright © 2003 - 2016. All rights reserved. See the full copyright notice for full copyright details.
Don’t automatically believe everything you read on teh Intergoogles. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and/or pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won’t necessarily happen to you. For more details see the Crazymeds big-ass disclaimer.