Open Minds is a column that explores your most pressing questions about mental health, with the goal of pushing back on stigma and cutting through the confusion. Send your questions to tonic@vice.com.

I just started taking psych meds and I feel sluggish, slow, and bloated. Is it always like this? How do people deal?

You just started, so unfortunately, it's normal to spend at least a few weeks or months figuring out what drugs—at what dosage—work for you. The upside of that, though, is that as much as things might suck right now, there's a solid chance this is the worst they'll be. There's usually a rather unfun period of physical adjustment when you start something new—a medication that might make you feel awful the first few times often won't be like that once your body adjusts. As much headway as we've made regarding psychiatric medications, we don't have a complete answer to what causes side effects like yours. Your particular meds could be depressing your thyroid function, or acting as a sedative on your central nervous system, making you feel sluggish and slow. Why this happens is a tricky question to answer, says Tristan Gorrindo, director of education for the American Psychiatric Association and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "We know that depression, for example, has fatigue as a huge symptom already. There's this dance of figuring out what's the medication and what's the underlying disease." Cognitive dulling, for example, is one of what Gorrindo describes as the "hallmarks" of depression to begin with. As for bloating or digestive issues, one thing people who are prescribed SSRIs don't generally seem to know is that there are actually way, way more serotonin receptors in the gut than in the brain. So it's not all that surprising that a lot of people experience initial physical discomfort and weight gain. Gorrindo says that even when prescribing SSRIs that are usually well-tolerated, he warns his patients about some gastrointestinal upsets while their bodies adjust.

Mental fog is common too, Gorrindo says. "[These meds] can also affect things like histamine—that same receptor that Benedryl hits… that can make you feel that same fogginess the next day." He also says some antipsychotics and some mood stabilizers get an unecessarily bad rap for fogginess and weight gain. But while it's a very real problem, people have more options these days than they used to. Plus, there's some evidence that weight gain tends to occur during initial treatment, and not the long-term maintenance stuff.

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The truth is that every psychiatric drug comes with a very long list of side effects, and some of those will, on some level, be with you for as long as the drug is. But there are usually ways to make it livable with time. I've spent a fair amount of time dealing with this stuff myself and talking to experts like Gorrindo—both as a journalist and during the course of my own treatment—and trying to figure out what works. To that end, there are some things I recommend you try. The first is that you start keeping a journal, and I say this as someone who thinks the journaling trend is stupid. Personal distaste aside, pretty much every doctor to ever prescribe me anything urged the importance of chronicling the way you work your new regimen into your life. I've yet to fully embrace it, but I do benefit from at least jotting down a few daily benchmarks in the Notes app on my phone.