“In addition to providing an important history, the medicine log can also give you insight.”If your teen takes medicine,I highly recommend keeping a medicine log. It’s easy to forget that a particular medicine was used for four or five days and produced an unbearable side effect. Why waste time on the wrong medicine down the road? The medicine log is like gold to the next psychiatrist who treats your child. Even if your teen’s current condition proves to be a blip, it could recur in ten or twenty years. You think you will always remember the names of the medicines used, but it’s so easy to forget.
Keeping track of medicines on the computer has the advantage that you can easily print it and bring a copy to a new psychiatrist or to the hospital if your child is being admitted. But anything is better than nothing, even if it consists of nothing more than a loose-leaf sheet of paper scribbled with dates, names of medicines, and reactions to them. I actually maintain two types of logs: one is written in paragraphs and includes events and details about my teen’s condition; the other is a simple list of the facts. I keep the first log for myself and the second to hand to the doctor or hospital. I also keep a file folder into which I stuff any pertinent papers such as blood work reports or hospital discharge directions. You will be amazed at how important a seemingly useless piece of paper will be in the future. Keep everything.
In addition to providing an important history, the medicine log can also give you insight. For example, you may notice that your teen is most likely to experience a side effect eight days into a new drug trial. Or you may see that most of your teen’s hospitalizations for depression occur in the spring.
“Some illnesses mimic mental illness…some medicines can incite symptoms like depression, anxiety, and even psychosis “