“Making the Most of My Mental Health Medications With the GeneSight Test”

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Madeline Bohlman won two pageant titles while quietly drowning. Behind the crown and the composure was a years-long battle with ADHD, anxiety, and eventually depression so heavy she stopped getting out of bed, skipped classes, and withdrew from her social life entirely. "I felt trapped in my own mind," she says. Diagnosed with ADHD in early childhood, she layered on anxiety medication as a teenager — a prescription she would stay on for nearly a decade — while the conditions continued to tangle and amplify each other in ways that standard treatment wasn't untangling.

When Genetics Enter the Conversation

The shift came when her clinician introduced her to the GeneSight test, a pharmacogenomic tool that analyzes how your specific genetic makeup may influence your response to mental health medications — including how your body metabolizes them and what side effects you might experience. According to Women's Health Magazine, the test covers many commonly prescribed medications for depression, anxiety, ADHD, and related conditions, and is increasingly being used to help clinicians move away from the exhausting trial-and-error approach that too many patients know by heart. The process is straightforward: a clinician orders the test, you submit a cheek swab (at the office or at home), and results return to the prescribing provider within days. It must be ordered by a licensed clinician — a psychiatrist, primary care physician, or nurse practitioner — and is meant to inform, not replace, a comprehensive treatment plan.

Bohlman had spent years assuming medication worked the same way for everyone. Learning otherwise was, by her own account, a revelation. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology found that depression outcomes improved when clinicians used the GeneSight test to guide treatment decisions — a finding that matters in a country where anxiety and depression rank among the most common mental health conditions, disproportionately affecting women and young adults. For patients worried about cost, most pay $330 or less out of pocket depending on insurance coverage.

After switching medications informed by her results, Bohlman describes the change as shedding weight she hadn't realized she'd been carrying. She reconnected with friends, re-engaged with daily life, and channeled the experience into mental health advocacy work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The death of fellow pageant titleholder Cheslie Kryst to suicide sharpened her sense of urgency. "Sharing my story could help others who feel alone," she says. "There is hope and help available." Her advice to anyone still cycling through medications that aren't working: talk to your doctor about whether pharmacogenomic testing makes sense for you.

Your genetics are not your destiny, but they may hold the key to why the medication everyone else swears by isn't working for you — and that information is worth asking for.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.