Do medications change who you are?

They don’t change who you are but can alter how you act and how you preceive yourself.

I honestly say they do. Whether you take them for depression, bipolar ir whatever… I think they change you. They get rid of the feelings you currently have and replace them with this happiness as if it is trying to delete all sad thoughts from your mind. You become somebody else entirely. Like have you ever seen Rescue Me? Denis takes those pills and he turns into this happy, loving, and dancing dude after just being the most serious person in the world. I have seen this in person to with a friend of my dad.

All of that wasn’t you before your bipolar took hold. It is not the medications that have changed you, but the manifestation of the disease.

“For most people Bipolar will develop in late adolescence or early adulthood.” Source

Yes. In my experience, the meds changed who I was. I could no longer think thoughts I thought when I was sick. It was so weird because once it happened nearly overnight. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, but it could have been as dramatic as thinking that suicide is a pretty good idea, and then they next day being horrified at the thought.

Or maybe it was thinking that no one would ever want to be my friend, and justifiably so, to being sure that I was a decent person. Weird stuff.

Anyway (and I’m sure I’ve written about this before, probably when I was daloon and I was struggling with the issue), I kept wondering who I was. Who was the real me. Someone suggested that they were all the real me, and I came to agree with that. I am people who seem kind of mutually exclusive, but all those different ways of seeing myself are contained within my sense of identity.

I am different from who I was. And I will be different again in the future. But it’s all me. And some of the changes are due to meds, which change the way I think and the things I can think. Some of the changes are due to my environment, and the things I do and the people I interact with. It’s all fundamental on some level, and continuous on another.

Eventually I learned that that change is due to brain chemistry, and there are many ways to influence your brain chemistry. There are mental techniques and environmental influences and drugs. Really, which method you choose is your choice, but they all do the same thing. Change is constant, no matter how fast it happens. Using meds to change just makes the change in brain chemistry happen more dramatically, and it’s easier to notice you’ve changed. But changing by drugs is no more remarkable than changing through meditation.

I think my meds are allowing me to be who I am, rather than be overwhelmed by anxiety. I’m able to do what I want to and refrain from doing what I don’t want to. I didn’t have the same kind of freedom before, because I was allowing emotions to take over to the point where my intellectual thought was affected.

They dont really change your personallity, but they can change your behaviour and make you seem like you are someone else.

Yeh i think they do.

I’m also bipolar, and I’m thankful that medication changes who I am. The take me from a frightened wholly introverted man to one who can interact in socially acceptable ways. I am alone quite a lot by choice, but I do have good relationships with my family now and participate in many social activities.