i am thinking (just thinking i don’t think i ever will but thinking) about quitting my meds to see if i am cured i know there is a possibility i might relapse BUT i could be cured and i want to know if i do relapse if it will be worse or not as bad as when it first started because u know what its like and u know whats real since u have had time on meds
My first relapse was my worst episode. Then again I never gave myself time to recover from the first episode…
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I think it is individual and, if you relapse, how long you are without meds. My first relapse I had a good support network but I was hospitalised and I didn’t like my freedom being taken away and the boredom so I got worse.
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I relapse several times a week. For me it comes on slowly, if I take 200mg Seroquel it gets better within an hour. If I wait it gets bad and can last 3-4hours at the longest.
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My relapse when I stopped taking meds was worse than any episode I had had before.
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Every time you relapse after stopping meds, you lose gray matter in your brain. You give yourself literal brain damage. Additionally, you are less likely to respond to your original med and dose the second time around. I used to take 40 mg of Geodon. Then I tried quitting my meds. Now, after my relapse, I need 80 mg to get the same effect. Know the risks before you do it.
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I was taking 20mg of Geodon only at night when I stopped my meds and now I take 80 in the morning and 80 at night.
So I went from 20 to 160 mg per day.
And they say that stuff causes heart disease.
Be careful
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Which makes me think we get worse getting off meds because we are on meds. I’m dependent on meds. I had a severe paranoid break on Topamax. Never was paranoid before. I still have some residual effects. I used to just have derealization really bad and negative symptoms. Now I’m SZ. And I feel SZ.
I have “voices”.
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I was told by a pdoc that whenever you stop meds and relapse you cause brain damage. but I have relapsed a couple of times and it was hell
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are you serious, is the brain damage from the relapse or from stopping the meds,
all this makes me really wanna not attempt quitting my meds now because I’m already on the highest dose there is so i would be
My disease initially was torture and hell for two years straight. My relapse 7 years later was torture and hell but it was in an entirely different form and under different circumstances and I came out of it after only a year. I would say that it was worse when I first became psychotic. But my relapse was a close second.
As far as I know, there is no cure for schizophrenia. There is recovery though.
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how does your episodes last so long i think my first one was like less than 6 months before i found a working med
My last relapse was like a year. It’s taken like 2 years to recover cognitively. I’m sort of better off now. On vraylar and my depersonalization is gone. I had that sucker for 5 years! I had to trade that for some iq points ( not much), a tad of paranoia, and “voices”. Seriously, it was worth it to me. I thought nothing was real.
Two psychiatrists told me that with each major relapse, it can take alot more time to get back to your normal “baseline”. I thought I could function without my medication so I fiddled/experimented with my medication post-relapse for about a year… I wasn’t doing well at all and had a second relapse even with medication. It was like 10x worse than my very first and second episode and I developed some PTSD.
It’s been 9 months and I’m still recovering. I learned my lesson and won’t be playing around with my meds again.
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I wouldn’t recommend stopping meds. I just tried cutting zyprexa in half last summer and I had a mega-episode. I did it because I was so tired of being overweight and it didn’t help the hallucinations. I had an infection, too. That wasn’t helping things.
I have had 3 episodes ever. My first one, that got me on meds in the first place, 2 years ago. My second 8 months after that (I was on meds) and my third one (paranoia only) 2 weeks later.
I am terrified to ever go off my meds. I am scared I will hurt myself. My second episode was a terrible suicide attempt (I thought I would die and come back as God) and I still have PTSD from it.
I do not recommend going off meds at all, ever. I take a handful of pills for MI and a bunch of other shyt. I hate it but I don’t want to suffer the consequences of not taking all that crap. Risperidone is at the top of my list. It is a must not miss drug! If I miss everything else, I can’t miss that.
Don’t ever stop taking your anti-psychotic med!
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I would not encourage stopping your meds without your psychiatrist’s agreement. The brain damage comes from the neurotoxic effects of psychosis caused by the relapse. EVERY time I have stopped my meds it has ended very very painfully. I’m talking traumatic mental breakdowns, hospitalizations, restraints, severe psychosis et cetera. I always get committed again after no more than 3 weeks of stopping my meds. You won’t last long.
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My sza relapses definitely seem to be getting worse and worse the older I get. Although I am in total remission right now, the last relapse I had, in 2015, was especially terrible, with vivid and florid closed eye hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and paranoid delusions and sleeplessness. This relapse occurred because in my thick stubbornness, I refused to use a medi planner, against my pdoc’s wishes, and got mixed up with my medications and ended up taking double dosages of all my medications in one day. So, my pdoc ordered me to quit taking all of my meds for two days. I immediately became very psychotic, relapsed and was hospitalized. I learned my lesson. I now use a three dose medi planner.
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My first dealing with the mental health system was seeing a therapist when I was 19. 6 months later I was put in a psyche ward for two weeks. I went from the psyche ward to a world famous experimental house for schizophrenics called Soteria House. Their main tenet was helping schizophrenics get better without medication and no hospitals. They claimed their success rate for helping schizophrenics was better than the standard of hospitals and meds. So I was 19 and living in this house with no meds for a year and I was floridly psychotic every minute of every day. Basically, they failed me and my next step was being locked up for 8 months in a psychiatric hospital. They put me on medication inside there but I was still psychotic the whole time. After I got released to a nice group home in a nice neighborhood in a beautiful peaceful city my psychosis let up and I started to finally show improvement.
The brain damage is from psychosis. Every psychotic episode causes you to lose gray matter.