Educate Yourself
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What are the most common side effects in medication classes and how can they best be managed?
The goal of any mental health treatment plan that includes medication is to find the lowest effective dose with the fewest side effects. Finding the lowest effective does often helps to reduce negative side effects. It’s best to ask your health care provider to help you find the lowest dose to reduce side effects.
If you are experiencing side effects, talking with your health care provider about different ways to find the lowest and most effective dose. Working with your health care provider, you can try to find the right combination of medication, dosage, therapy, time of day medications are taken and other factors that can impact the potential for side effects.
You will have to decide with your health care provider how best to manage side effects. This may include changing medications, lowering the dose, taking medications at different times of the day or learning to live with the side effects.
You may want to access the Medication Tracking Worksheet in the Educate Yourself resource group to see how different medications, doses and other factors impact you. This information can help you determine the treatment that works best for you.
For a list of common side effects across medications classes and strategies for coping with these side effects, check out Managing Side Effects in the Educate Yourself resource group.