After three uninterrupted years of illness I made a recovery and two years later could come off meds and succeeded to stay med free and relatively symptom free for five years.
And now for past eight years after I relapsed I was on meds and every time I tried coming off I couldn’t.
How come I can’t come off meds anymore and in those five years I was ok?
Strange to me…
Is it because I have to be well for two years before coming off meds? Or is it just that after a relapse the more relapses you get the more likely you will get more? Or what? Or is it that my sza gets worse over time?
I’ve had times off meds pretty much symptom free but it always comes back. Some of us are episodic not chronic. I look at my meds as almost like insurance.
I was off a AP for about 4 years,
Took anxiety meds and Zoloft,
I did fine without medication, but I wasn’t really making any progress in my social/individual life,
So my pdoc wanted to try more AP options.
The one I’m on now I kinda don’t want to stop because I’ve seen improvement,
If I got off it my symptoms would probably magnify.
Would take a good amount of time for my dopamine receptors to be stabilized and unblocked.
It always ascerbates how quickly you get it each time you stop meds…very dangerous…sometimes things happen to schizophrenics when they are delusional and they end up hurting themselves badly or worse…please stay on your meds…and work diligently with your psychiatrist about getting the balance you need if you are unsatisfied with your meds.
The problem is that without meds you can’t know if your symptoms are worsening toward a psychosis. The mind is tricky. I always believed that I was normal when I was off meds for a year until I had a worse psychosis. I wouldn’t take another chance.
Many theories has shown that SZ gets worse with age. The brain tissue, cortex, in the parietal lobe is less than normal people and decreases with age more in SZ patients. The parietal lobe is responsible for sensory integration and interpretation which explains why we hallucinate, become delusional and paranoid.
Also when you use APs, your brain adapts to it so you have more dopamine receptors and these receptors become more sensitive to dopamine. APs blocks dopamine and your brain try to couteract by increasing dopamine function.
That’s why you get a worse psychosis than your initial one.(It happened to me) When you stop meds, your dopamine function will shoot even higher than your first psychosis.
I have taken 4 psy university courses and got very good grades.
Any time I came off my med’s I could keep it together for a while, but then when something happened that upset me I would come unglued and do something stupid. It’s easy to resent the med’s because they do have limiting effects. I like Geodon because I am clear headed on it. It actually helps my writing. But it also weakens me substantially physically, and I hate that. I sometimes wish I could get off Geodon so I can work out harder.