Preface: I am not a neuroscientist, or doctor, and this will be a super general comment that I will do my best to provide some links to later when I am not on my phone.
It’s okay to be scared of medication. My fear also stemmed from a fear of the unknown, more research needed, and inexperience.
This is what mental illness sometimes is—sometimes nothing can be wrong and our brain just doesn’t provide the chemicals. There might be a family history that has been undiagnosed or things you just haven’t seen, but like. Sometimes it’s just there. It sounds like yours was drug related, at least since you mentioned it, and it’s not that uncommon either. Especially with psychedelics (shrooms, LSD, etc.)
Drugs can be cool, but yeah, they can do some shit to you. Even if you have little to no history, drugs, especially psychedelics, can cause psychosis. You can see plenty of stories from people who had episodes of psychosis after acid on the correct subreddits (I can’t think of the names at this time, but can get back to you with them). Weed can cause paranoia and also some psychosis, dissociation, etc. Some people have had maybe a mild struggle with mental illness where drugs exacerbated it and some have been perfectly fine with doing all of the things until one day, it all just turned into a bad time. I had an experience with LSD that I struggled with dissociation with for a year and still do today. That night, I was definitely in a state of psychosis and I think it took me a couple days to recover. Again, dp/dr was still a thing. I can’t really smoke weed and sometimes can’t drink because I know that, while I feel good that day and going into these substances, it can come subtly and then quickly and then it’s a bad time.
Medication doesn’t have to be the end all be all. You do not have to take it for the rest of your life, but it does take work to get off of it. There’s a lot of awareness, I think, that goes into working through things with medication, but it’s supposed to be a tool—when your brain isn’t providing the chemicals, it provides them so you can do what you need to do (sometimes just getting up that morning and taking care of chores) and create those healthy pathways, again with the goal of eventually going off of it. Some people are able to, some people aren’t, depending on the illness and it’s severity.
If you don’t feel your counselor is helping, find another one. Same thing with a psych, one who can give you more info about these things and why meds and the specific type would help—it might take a while to find a good one, but I don’t think any counselor or psych should be unwilling to give a patient options and info on what’s going on with them and going into their body. There have even been things like “dna” tests (usually saliva, I think) to find out what medicines may or may not work for you (but I don’t know about these enough to say whether they’re accurate and I haven’t researched them to find out the science behind them—I have only heard about them, so by no means am I vouching for their credibility).
Getting though mental illness is always frustrating. If it was drug induced, know that you’re not the first one and you’re capable of getting through it, like many people have.
Again, medication isn’t anything to be afraid of. The biggest hurdle is that it’s unknown to you, I think. It takes a lot of research, especially if you have to end up doing it on your own, but the information is there. And it may be trial and error to find the right medication for you. That’s all standard. It’s a shitty process, but you can get through it, and it’ll be worth it.
Sorry I don’t have any hard sources to give you at this time—I will try to comment later with some articles or things for you to look into. A super general one is psychologytoday’s website. They help you find docs, but there are some informative articles as well.
Again, will do my best to comment later and give you some resources about the different medication types, drug induced psychosis, and some people’s more negative experiences from drugs.
If this wasn’t drug related, feel free to correct me and I will stick with the basic resources on mental illness, chemicals, and medication.
To reiterate, not a doctor, not a scientist, just speaking through my own struggles and research.