I had government insurance last year, and lost it. It's been a year without meds now. I was doing alright for a while, managed the symptoms through routine and physical activity, but I'm really struggling this month. The catatonic phase lasted for so fucking long I barely even recognized it was starting. But I'm seeing the altars again, the shadow people, social interaction is starting to become unbearably anxious, I feel like the person in my brain watching me fry the egg. The lines going between everything. One of them is watching me.
And this psychosis wave is fucking terrible compared to my last one. When shit started popping off for me, it was this dream like euphoric mania, where I'd see things like tree leaves on a color gradient, or start hearing full songs just start playing out of nowhere. The only way I can describe it is feeling like a main character of a play. Not in the sense that I'm particularly important or unique, more in the way that it felt like whoever was watching wasn't a stalker but like a film director, picking when to play songs. I used to hallucinate friends I hadn't spoken to in years, and would occasionally get to have chats with "them". This all was extremely unhealthy, but at least it was pretty easy to cope with.
It felt infinitely funnier back then. As time has gone on, the thought irregularities have become darker and more disruptive. First episode lasted really long before the mania crash, but this just feels like already being in the mania crash and it only has lower to go
I know I need to be on meds, but I haven't had money or insurance for it. America wants schizophrenic people in psychosis and homeless.
I appreciate it. It's very much a situation where solidarity seems to be the only thing attainable.
To answer your question on promethazine and oxys, doctors in America are a lot different after the massive egg on their face that was allowing the opiate craze to happen. They're adjusted for this by underperscribing anything even slightly controlled. Promethazine obviously isn't an opiate, but people on opiates like it because of the ever famous codeine/promethazine cough syrup. Every doctor you see about meds assumes that you're trying to get drugs to get high. So unless you're paying a lot for your doctor, SSRIs and anti-psychotics are pretty much the only thing doctors will prescribe now.
Yeah, it seems like a real mess and the overcorrection is going to have its own blowback sooner or later.
On the other side of the dopamine dysregulation landscape, there's that chronic shortage of ADHD meds in the US which gets exacerbated more and more each year because the rates of diagnosis and prescribing are increasing and yet the DEA hasn't adjusted the amount of stimulant meds available to be in line with the medical establishment, which is now causing a major shortage of Vyvanse globally due to some quirks in capitalism that I'll spare you the boring details of.
It's a big mess 😖
Oh I know all about that, my girlfriend has an adderall prescription. What makes it even more annoying is that making amphetamines is only marginally harder to make than hard liquor. Anybody with an internet connection can make enough meth to last them for months. Or buy 2 scripts worth of meth for $20. This also coincides with some medicaid changes, where medicaid will not pay for your controlled substances (amphetamines, painkillers, benzos, ect.) but will track how much you spend on them throughout the year. So now people who are prescribed amphetamine are liable to lose state healthcare because they have money for their amphetamine. Anything controlled is slowly becoming unattainable, through a mix of shortages, overcorrection from the opiate epidemic, and by fucking with people's insurance. Everything I just listed is a feature, not a bug. They want us to be criminals.
Pretty much every drug issue in America is completely manufactured by the state. I have no direct proof of this, but the fentanyl crysis in the states is obviously being ran by feds. If the fentanyl was coming from another country, why does America have BY FAR the highest amount of fent deaths? Forcing more neurodiverse people to get their medication off the streets leads to more people getting things laced with fent, more death. It's a silent extermination campaign against neurodivergent people. I only expect the shortage to get worse as the ghouls at the DEA realize they can get away with more.
For real.
I'm going to speak a bit vaguely so I'm not putting out too much information but the region I am in has an anomalously low ADHD diagnosis rate due to a big player's influence and their skepticism towards ADHD. You can probably guess what the stats are like for illicit amphetamine usage in the same region.
Like if you take a demographic of people who are predisposed to addiction, who are especially prone to addiction when they aren't appropriately medicated, and who happen to feel a whole lot more normal when they take stimulants and then you put an effective blockade on them accessing appropriate medication... it doesn't take a PhD to figure out what happens next.