Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
The number worth watching is not the dose but the direction. A dose that keeps creeping upward says something that a steady one does not.
You are often the person who sees this, because you hear about it in passing across months while the prescriber sees someone twice a year. Note it plainly and with dates, and pass it on rather than raising it as an accusation. Needing more for the same effect is information about the medicine, not about the person's character.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). Care shared between people is described as the ordinary way to run things, not as an exception.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Coordinated care models, where a case manager, a prescriber and a therapist actually talk to one another, improved mental health outcomes and quality of life across a range of conditions and settings. That evidence is about how care is organised rather than about any single conversation. It is still the closest thing to a reason for making sure what you notice reaches the person who prescribes.
Woltmann E, Grogan-Kaylor A, Perron B, Georges H, Kilbourne AM, Bauer MS. (2012). Comparative effectiveness of collaborative chronic care models for mental health conditions across primary, specialty, and behavioral health care settings: systematic review and meta-analysis.. The American journal of psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A rising dose shows the body adapting, which is the thing worth catching early.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If you have been given a drug from one category for a problem in another, it is fair to ask which part of it is doing the work. Often the useful effect is a side effect that has been borrowed.
Ask what symptom you are aiming at rather than what the diagnosis is called. Nothing anyone takes recognises a category; it acts on whatever is happening in the body.
Anxiety comes in two rough families. Fear is the sudden bodily kind that arrives in a rush, and worry is the slow kind that circles and will not settle.