No Such Thing

When people talk about mental health treatment, whether it's medications, supplements, diets, coping skills and management strategies, or even an old wives' tale that worked for them or someone they know, they tend to talk in absolutes. They say things like, "X always works." Or "X works for everyone." Or even, "Z never works."

When I had to be evaluated by a crisis counselor in the beginning of my mental health treatment, he was stunned when he found out I had tried Lexapro and it hadn't worked for me. He literally said, "But Lexapro works for everyone, so I don't know why it didn't work for you." (And, yes, I felt like it was somehow my fault the medication that "works for everyone" didn't work for me.)

We shouldn't speak in absolutes about things in general, but we really shouldn't speak in absolutes when it comes to mental health treatment. It would have been much more accurate and felt much less like he was blaming me for something I had no control over if the crisis counselor would have said something like, "We see a lot of success when we use Lexapro to treat X, Y, and Z." If he would have said something like that, I wouldn't have spent weeks afterward feeling like I had done something wrong and like there was something extra that could be wrong with me that would make my OCD and panic disorder harder to treat.

It wasn't my fault that the medication that "works for everyone" didn't work for me. I have absolutely no control over how a medication interacts with my brain. I have no control over whether or not I experience side effects or whether or not a medication works for me at all. You can do everything right: take as directed, switch up the time of day you take a medication like I was directed to, do whatever else the prescribing professional tells you to do, but still, sometimes that medication just doesn't do what it was designed to do with your brain. That's why (generally) more than one medication exists to treat the same condition, and why finding the right treatments is a trial-and-error process. 

Everyone's brain is different. Even in two people with the same mental health condition, we often see different symptoms and different triggers, and we see that the mental illness feels different for each of those people. So, of course, when we think about how the same mental illness looks different from person to person, it makes sense that a thing that "works for everyone" doesn't actually exist. How can it when each person's brain and each person's experience with mental illness is different?

I'll end with this: There is no such thing as a medication, supplement, diet, or a set of management techniques and coping strategies that truly works for everyone. Every brain is different. Just because something with a high success rate doesn't work for you doesn't mean you did anything wrong or that something else is wrong with you. Finding the treatment or the right combination of treatments is a trial-and-error process, not a one-size-fits-all experience.