Dopamine improves my negative and cognitive symptoms but make my positive symptoms worse. Am I the only one? My pdoc told me sz positive symptoms are caused by an excess of dopamine in some brain areas while sz negative symptoms are caused by a lack of dopamine in other brain areas. Should I believe that? If its so simple why can scientists normalize dopamine levels in all the brain? Can’t they target specific brain regions?
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Or is it permanent brain damage?
If you take a suitable dopamine precursor with a selective dopamine antagonist antipsychotic, you may come up with something that works well for you.
It just takes to much time and money for a Doctor to do it for you.
Everyone who has schizophrenia with both positive and negative symptoms at the same time, have some problems with the production of dopamine somewhere along the line, also they have excessive dopamine in parts of their brain.
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The theory is simple, but I guess actually creating drugs that target certain areas of the brain or normalize dopamine levels throughout the brain is much harder. My guess would be that once current drugs pass the BBB and enter your brain, they circulate throughout all the blood vessels and are distributed in a bunch of places.
Reminds me of the old saying “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is”.
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Partial dopamine agonists do this to a certain extent by only allowing a partial activating of dopamine receptors in the areas with excess thereby reducing dopamine effect in that area and allowing a partial activating in the areas lacking thereby increasing the dopamine effect in that area, but I don’t think it is an exact science.
At least that is my understanding of it.
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No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Or your offspring.
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Wish I’d never gone on these meds in the first place
I’m sure God had my dopamine level just perfect before psych docs intervened
Nothing wrong with having mental differences anyway
Meds don’t help much but once you take them you become reliant on them
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In theory Abilify is supposed to do this.
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Meds only fix part of the problem, you need to use other tools to fix as much as you can of the rest.
I think this all depends on the individual. Meds completely wiped out my positive symptoms, so they did it all for me in this area.
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Oh, I can take enough to wipe out all of mine too. The problem is that the head meds aren’t targeted enough to only switch off the broken parts of my brain, they disable large swathes of it. I’m left unable to think properly and too tired to do anything. That’s why I’m trying to stay in the sweet spot of just enough meds to keep symptoms where I can manage them, but not so much that I can’t function in the rest of my life. The CBT let’s me mostly shove the positives into the corner as a matter of habit now.
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Invega works for me. Its an antagonist meaning it blocks dopamine and serotonin receptors. I can see from one time the nurse spilled my dose, when the medication was too low in my system before the next injection, my neurochemistry remains a mess. I conclude this because I started behaving strange.
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Meds have screwed up my brain and now I’m dependent on the injection to live half a life and it is a piss poor life I have
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I am on the minimum dose for sz on my meds, so I am fortunate in this area. The minimum dose does it for me.
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Complaints aside, that is reality.
You bugger. Can I interest you in swapping brains?
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You have a pretty solid brain in a lot of areas, despite the positives on low dose meds. That’s pretty evident on this forum.
I wish it was so simple that if you suffer from sz you should take a drug that decreases dopamine. If depressed you should take a drug that enhances serotonin. If anxious a drug that increase serotonin and GABA etc…
After 30 years as a psychiatric patient, my conclusion is that every person / brain is different and don’t necessarily works like the textbooks says. According to the current theories about depression i should take a drug that enhances serotonin and I have tried them all with very modest results.
I cant say the neurotransmitter theory as such is flawed or false, but it is still so primitive that the best you can do as a patient is trial and error.
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My skull is pretty thick in places as well.
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I agree with your pdoc. He is insightful to think there is a lack of dopamine in some parts of the brain. A lot of people simplistically think that schizophrenia = too much dopamine.
Once the drugs are absorbed into the blood stream, the heart distributes them throughout the body. How do you get the drugs to flow only to select locations? It can’t be done with regular oral medications or even normal injections. You’d have to inject the drugs directly into the appropriate locations in the brain. Alternatively, you could do direct stimulation with electrodes inserted into the brain.
-Albert.
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