A Practical Guide To Psychiatric Medications For Addiction Care (Update from 2025)A Practical Guide To Psychiatric Medications For Addiction Care (Update from 2025)
Addiction Medicine Made Easy
Dr Casey Grover offers a plain-language 2025 update on psychiatric medications in addiction care, covering key classes, safety concerns, and off-label uses. The episode focuses on practical decision-making for co-occurring conditions like depression, PTSD, ADHD, and stimulant use disorder.
36:01•22 Jun 2026
Psych Meds Made Simple for Addiction Care in 2025
Episode Overview
- Antidepressants are framed as increasing emotional resilience and can help with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and more.
- Many psychiatric medications gain useful off-label roles, such as topiramate for alcohol and stimulant use disorders or trazodone for insomnia.
- Long-term benzodiazepine and Z-drug use is discouraged due to worsened anxiety over time and concerns like benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction.
- Non-addictive options such as SSRIs, SNRIs, mirtazapine, trazodone, hydroxyzine, clonidine, propranolol, gabapentin, and ramelteon are prioritised in addiction care.
- Medication choices are made by listing all conditions, prioritising the most urgent problems, and using the fewest drugs that can safely address multiple issues.
“"Antidepressants give people more emotional resilience – they can take on more stress in their day and not feel overwhelmed."”
How do different strategies aid in addiction recovery? This episode of "Addiction Medicine Made Easy" tackles one of the trickiest parts of treatment: psychiatric medications for people trying to get sober. Dr Casey Grover shares an updated 2025 overview of psych meds, aimed at staff in residential treatment and anyone curious about how these drugs actually work in real life.
He starts by cheerfully debunking a viral myth about “kids smoking bedbugs” and then gets straight into clear, no-nonsense teaching on how medications are developed, approved by the FDA, and then often used for other conditions over time. You’ll hear him break down antidepressants, anxiety meds, antipsychotics, mood stabilisers, and ADHD medications using simple analogies like trucks, sports cars, and limousines, so complex pharmacology actually feels manageable.
He stresses that antidepressants are really about “emotional resilience” more than just sadness, and shows how one drug can often help with multiple issues like depression, PTSD, anxiety, pain, or stimulant cravings. A big focus is on safety in addiction care. Dr Grover explains why he avoids long-term benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, discusses emerging concerns like benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction, and highlights non-addictive options for sleep, anxiety, and ADHD.
He also walks through a practical case of a woman with stimulant use disorder, ADHD, and PTSD, showing how he chooses meds that hit more than one problem at once without overloading her. The style is relaxed, funny in spots, and very grounded in day-to-day clinical reality—perfect for busy clinicians, treatment staff, or anyone in recovery who wants to understand what their meds are actually doing.
If psychiatric prescriptions have ever felt like alphabet soup, could this be the explanation that finally makes it click?
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