Our philosophy of safe prescribing
Do you feel safe with your current providers' prescribing practices? Do you worry about addiction from a growing tolerance to your meds? Are your meds just covering up the root cause of your symptoms? Hope Mental Health wants to help!
Hope Mental Health is very holistic in its approach to treating mental health conditions. Using various ways to help a condition, HMH realizes that some treatments can be harmful, especially in the long run. Therefore, we tend to be conservative in our approach to prescribing controlled substances. Any controlled substance, by nature, is very addictive, which can’t be taken lightly.
Over time, most patients develop a tolerance and the dose that worked previously, may not be as effective anymore. This is how doses can creep up over time. In addition, there is very little evidence that stimulants are safe and effective in the long run. Typically, the drug companies only do their testing for up to 28 weeks and then claim that their drug does not have long-term negative effects. There is more and more research coming out that suggests that stimulants are bad for the heart and other organs of the body, especially when used at high doses and long term.
Whenever possible, with ADHD, we will use effective non-controlled prescription medications and supplements which usually work for most people. In some cases, if it becomes necessary to prescribe a stimulant for a needed condition, we will make every effort to keep it at lower effective doses, perhaps by introducing a non-controlled substance to augment the stimulant. We also encourage regular “drug vacations” to help prevent tolerance.
We rarely prescribe benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, etc…) Not only can they be dangerous, but they can make Depression worse and can cause dangerous interactions when combined with alcohol or Cannabis or other drugs. So, if you have very specific needs such as flying on a plane with a flying phobia, or needing a blood draw and with a needle phobia, a specific-needs prescription of a benzodiazepine may be appropriate. Of course in the long-run, these examples will benefit greatly from good therapy.
