Reply to Tell me about medicating your child for anxiety/cod

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[quote=Anonymous]PANDAS PP here.  I was surprised that I was labeled arrogant and anti-med because I elaborated, as requested, on side effects my child had on an SSRI.  I took pains to state I am not anti-med.  I would have like the meds to have worked and to have worked without side effects.

Having a child with severe PANDAS OCD is trying enough without also having to drastically rearrange everyone's schedule to do therapy in some distant place twice a week and having to do ERP homework every night.  Therapy did work for us, and I am grateful, but there was also a huge cost in terms of time, money, energy, and my relationship with my child.  Perhaps I was not clear enough about that.  The anti-meds people who think others are just too lazy to do therapy and want quick fixes etc.  never seem to factor in all of the many costs of what it can take for therapy to be effective.

My child's side effects were in no way life threatening, but they lowered his quality of life, which already was pretty miserable owing to the constant OCD, which occurred even as he slept so there was no relief ever, to an intolerable level.  Those years of my son's life were pretty grim and at times we are without any hope things would ever get better. DS was even rejected from an NIH PANDAS program because he was deemed too chronic, but that did not prevent the young doctor who delivered the news from gratuitously implying that the only reason we wanted to be part of the the NIH study was to get free medical care and they had so many other people coming to them who were poor but, no, she could not recommend anyone in the private sector who could help.  She judged us to be high SES and, thus, unworthy of any publicly paid help.  I was unable to return back to work that day because of the overwhelming sense of hopelessness I felt that there was no help anywhere for my DS.

I am glad we made it through, albeit with a huge amount of hard work, but even though it is years later I am surprised how much it stung to have my attempts to describe our experience of SSRI side effects met with derision from posters on this forum.

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