“Making the Most of My Mental Health Medications With the GeneSight Test”
A former pageant winner
Reported by Women's Health Magazine.
Madeline Bohlman spent years winning pageant crowns while privately drowning. From a preschool-age ADHD diagnosis to college-era depression so heavy she stopped attending class, her mental health journey was a decade-long cycle of symptoms that compounded each other — anxiety feeding distraction, depression compounding both. She cycled through counselors and medications, finding partial relief and then losing it again. "I felt trapped in my own mind," she says.
The shift came when her clinician suggested something Bohlman had never heard of: the GeneSight test, a pharmacogenomic tool that maps how a patient's genetic variations may affect their ability to metabolize and respond to mental health medications. According to Women's Health Magazine, the test covers a wide range of commonly prescribed treatments for depression, anxiety, ADHD, and related conditions — and can help clinicians move away from the guesswork model of psychiatric care. The logistics are straightforward: a clinician orders the test, a cheek swab is collected (at home or in-office), and results are typically returned within days. It must be ordered by a licensed prescriber and is meant to inform, not replace, comprehensive clinical judgment.
Why Trial-and-Error Isn't Good Enough
Anxiety and depression rank among the most prevalent mental health conditions in the U.S., hitting women and young adults especially hard. The standard approach — prescribe, wait, adjust, repeat — can stretch into years of ineffective treatments and side effects. A recently published study in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology found that patient outcomes for depression improved when clinicians had access to GeneSight results during treatment planning. For Bohlman, who had spent nearly a decade on the same prescription without knowing her genetics might be working against her, that information was a turning point. "I always thought medications worked the same for everyone," she says. "Learning that genetics affects our response was a revelation."
After switching medications informed by her results, Bohlman describes the change as shedding weight she'd been carrying so long she'd forgotten it was there. She started leaving the house, seeing friends, functioning — things that had quietly slipped away during her worst stretch. That momentum carried into advocacy: following the death of fellow pageant titleholder Cheslie Kryst, Bohlman began working with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to push for more open conversations around mental health treatment. Her advice to anyone still cycling through ineffective prescriptions: talk to your doctor and ask about pharmacogenomic testing. On cost, the out-of-pocket expense is typically $330 or less depending on insurance.
Personalized medicine isn't a luxury — when your brain chemistry is the variable, a one-size-fits-all prescription strategy is simply bad science, and you deserve better than years of waiting to feel like yourself.
Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.
