i still doesn’t know it cause i am in a bad shape still and sometimes i dont even feel them. but i feel them more and more lately, since 3 days now… for 5 months they were like candies for me…
i am still wondering if your ap killed your emotions or it doesn’t work like this( i hope so)? i think ive felt some emotions today, it was good 
even though that i ve realized that reality can be a hard thing even when you are normal wow :)…
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I felt emotions and didn’t feel subnormal when I was psychotic. I don’t really know how much of the emotional flatness I should attribute to my personality, the illness, or the medications. It’s tough being us that’s for sure.
Glad you’re feeling some emotions.
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I think it’s kind of ironic that the number one emoticon on here is a “slight smile.” Lol
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Yes my current ap killing my emotions include anger happiness love upset sexual feelings etc but i m ok with that.at least i m not sick anymore.i m not take my all time in bed trying to fix my hallucinatic body illusion.
i cant imagine a life without emotions. dostoievski said that the biggest suffering is when you cant love anymore. without my meds, i cant feel a love at all… i hope now its just an adjusting time in order to regain my emotions after some time :).
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somebody who recovered on the side of the emotions? in fact i have emotions- but mainly negative ones i think… i feel my fear in my soul like a butterfly, its shaky in my soul wow…in my craziness, i had also some euphoria but it was quite anhedonic also… joy because i was delusional. it sounds paradoxal but yes, my joy was without real pleasure in fact… now, i want the depth of the feelings, the depth of the emotions but maybe its a hard thing to achieve when you live with schizophrenia. ive suffered a lot that i am a monster without feelings, i was feeling like a real psycho for years because of it…
Haldol killed my emotions. Geodon isn’t so bad in that regard.
but crimby, did you had some emotions when you were unmedicated? me, i had some but ouch -anger, depression, fear, it was like a tornado for me… i needed to be calmed down first…
That was the way it was for me. My emotions were dangerously out of control.
maybe the second generations aps are less killers of emotions. today i really felt a depth in my emotions, it was so cool after all these years. you are on Geodon now? great, its not so strong for an ap from what i know… you are lucky one. me, i respond only to Zyprexa, the others had too much bad side effects on me…
but in my case, everything is by waves. sometimes i am ■■■■■■ up, sometimes i am calm. sometimes i feel something good for 5 minutes in the day but my brain is messy right now i find. and it affects my emotions also. maybe the mind and the emotions are connected isn’t it?
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I agree that emotions are connected to the mind. Geodon has been a godsend for me. It controls my symptoms with the fewest side effects of any medication. Maybe you could look for more drugs that control your symptoms without killing your emotions. The world was pretty grey when I was on Zyprexa.
ill see. like i told you i am not really in some grey world now…its just sometimes that i feel without emotions but it lasts only one hour for example. the rest of the time i feel different from when i am not medicated. in my illness and now with the Zyprexa, i have a lot of feelings in the day. i dont speak about emotions but my state is changing a lot through the hours, through the day. i want just to wait to see one stabilized state…
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My emotions are very irregular. I think that is true of a lot of sz’s.
I think not,I remember I have no emotion when I stopped meds.I don’t like to say it but it’s the illness.I heard after sometime the negative symptom will be less severe and eventually gone.
Killed mine for sure. Once I got off them I had a hell of an adjustment to feeling. It’s important to keep in mind that feelings and thoughts can be scrambled and heightened with schiz so meds killing emotions can be especially intense. I think part could be learning to feel. It’s weird because we’re wired to take in and deal with an increased load of stimuli, even if we internalize everything we have a lot of static to cut through just to have basic thoughts. Meds can regulate things but don’t always work with how we are uniquely made so curbed emotions can mean less anxiety but also profound numbness. I think docs like us dulled quite a bit. It can signify we are safe and not a threat to ourselves (or others). I found that it made it hard to explain my symptoms because I was numb on the surface but raging underneath. Each med does it differently. It’s a battle to learn how to feel when on a drug.
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me too without meds I am like this. numb on the surface but raging inside… for the moments I am calmer with Zyprexa which I find ok but no so dumb emotionally. in fact, I hope its matter of time to rediscover emotions. its hard living like this, without positive ones…
today I am really calmer and I guess- sedated… is it the way to recovery? no depth of emotions still but maybe the first thing to do in my psychosis is to calm down the suffering?..
Yeah. Keep a record if you can. Like a journal of your thoughts or doodles. When I came out of the numbness I had a lot of trouble. I think people who are around you a lot and see your demeanor calm down feel it’s a good thing. They don’t realize the turmoil that burns below. It’s sort of like a fire beneath the surface that is left to its own devices. I know that for me there was a turn. After the first few months on Clozaril I showed improvement but that’s not saying much. After that it went downhill and then picked up speed and just got awful. If you lose your ability to feel and use your mind in good ways then you can have symptoms return and be harder to deal with. I think a very big problem with treatment is the fact that docs don’t really know what we’re like. You can sit there and talk and they see a change in you but you can’t verbalize what the meds do or the illness does because they can’t understand it. It’s almost like this victory when they see you aren’t ragingly psychotic and they almost give up helping things improve. Having full blown symptoms is a prison. Having treatment that makes you able to be out of a hospital and do things here and there while managing med side effects that can strip you of a lot is a different kind of prison. It’s like they take you from a max security facility and put you in a medium security one where you have some privileges but you’re still a prisoner then tell you you’re lucky you’re not in max security so be grateful. Docs need to learn our language. They don’t know what our brains are like and so they come from the wrong angle a lot. It’s not as simple as psychosis is bad let’s make you not hallucinate and we’re all set. There’s a lot more too that. Being on meds helps so many people but that help is relative to the hell they were in before. Slowly you can realize the hell of having your emotions zapped and your body changed by the drugs. I know I was grateful because I knew the alternative. I was still miserable but then as time went on my symptoms were worse but they were trapped inside. It’s ok to be grateful your meds are working and be mad your brain is zombied. I tried to see it as a temporary respite. It can calm you enough that you can feel a bit more stable but after that you have to start looking for some treatment plans that meds can’t help with or you’ll end up a zombie long term. The meds can take you away so it’s important to make them work with you instead of giving them full control. As your brain gets numb you have to fight it. You can fight some of the numbness enough to train yourself to live with it. It’s still not great. These meds are so hardcore. Hopefully they can get you to a place where you can be with a minimal dose or even without them.
living without meds|? I dont know if ill can do it. without them I stop eating, stop showering, starting to think by a torn way with bad headaches without the possibility to get out of bed(paranoia and heaviness)… you ll say I am a zombie but a lot of people talk to me to stop my meds… wow, I am fed up by their opinions… idk… maybe I am a zombie yes…
Definitely not saying stop your meds. It’s possible to be unmedicated but a lot of factors come into play. I was without any symptoms for 2 years when I began to discontinue. It’s not as easy as just not wanting to take them and going off. I think a lot of people don’t get that. I dealt with plenty of the. People who make it seem like you’re nuts for taking them when you and they know they’re causing problems have zero clue what being schizophrenic is like. Meds are often brutal but we take them because as brutal as they are we know an even worse area of hell and we don’t want to return.
Meds can’t be the end though. They have to be part of your treatment plan that includes a lot of things. Meds can kill things about your personality that you have to actively work to get back. I used to be convinced I would be on aps forever. Things changed and meds changed and I ended up no longer having symptoms and the meds were making me sick to the point it was dangerous and I decided I was done. I was confident at that point I would be ok but I would have also taken whatever I got because it would have been better than the side effects. I knew what I was doing. Like I knew how bad things were for me at one point but it was also half my life ago and I knew my current situation. I would have accepted anything to be free of the side effects. I had spent the last two years (while symptoms went from minimal to zero positive symptoms but still to this day deep mood symptoms and anxiety and some weird thought stuff that I can work through) back in school and monitoring myself and managing my current stressors with various types of therapies and self care. I knew how to help myself seek support or cope through alternative means. All of that is learned. Even on meds you need to be doing that. Down the road you will likely (at least) either change your dose or change meds and things in your life will change. You need to work with the meds and fight against what they take so that you can retain who you are as a person and not become a med zombie. Because when things change and your new meds or whatever take away different parts you’ll have an idea of how to get on track. All the things people here have said about how they could never go off their meds and what happens to them is the reason they shouldn’t go off. You know your situation and regardless of your goals with your current regimen you have to take care of yourself as best you can. Take control of it because too often we are given these horrible prognoses and then resign ourselves to this awful dark place of no hope to escape. The first step is get yourself to where you need to be with your current situation. It will help you in general. From there you will have more freedom to lower your dose (which helps all side effects) and can gain some more freedom. Even if you never intend to go off or hope to and lower the dose and decide it’s not worth the risk for you, you will still have some coping skills and sense of control over your situation that you need regardless.