Yeah, the meds can help and hurt all at once. But for me, they help more than they hurt.
Life was good but I’d never go off meds these days. Grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
It’s quite hard to take AP’s. I will attempt to come off, but only because I have been symptom free for years. It might not work, but it’s worth a try.
Antipsychotics definitely effect me emotionally and physically, I want to get off them but I don’t think that would be wise. I’ve been hospitalized so many times and I think I would lose it for good if I got off the meds.
I’ve found about the right combination and dose of med’s that work for me. Geodon 80 x 2 daily, and Seroquel 400 x 2 daily. They keep me out of trouble.
For me the first two APs I tried, namely Aripiprazole and Risperidone, not only weren’t working towards helping the existing symptoms, they added new ones which weren’t any better than the existing ones. The latest one, Latuda, has been working wonders and only gave me Akathisias for one day after taking it for 18 months, here’s to hoping it was a one off, if I didn’t have the memory of Abilify I might have not even linked the two.
APs are always a compromise, even Latuda which gave me no significant side effects works through hindering dopamine and serotonin and that has negative effects even if everything works out perfectly.
My brain depends on ap’s without it im a mess to say the least
Happy to hear you are having success with Latuda
I’m supposed to start the transition to that next month
My pdoc is thinking Latuda or Vraylar
How’s your negatives and cognition on that? Weight?
Thanks 
Weight going great, I’ve started a diet around 4 months after starting to take it and I am now down almost 30 kg, down to almost 15% bodyfat at this point, my estimate is 17%, and I still have no significant hunger despite my very significant caloric deficit.
Negative symptoms kind of better but also not really, it’s more that I’ve gotten used to my new let’s call them tastes. It didn’t make them worse, so that’s something.
Cognitive symptoms there was a significant recovery initially over the first months, then I think everything I stacked on top of that over time was for stuff I did to regain a whole host of lost functionalities, not due to Latuda but anyways 18 months later, still improving.
A note for the positives, although you didn’t ask, the greatest achievement was that over time it didn’t just help with delusions and to a lesser extent hallucinations, it also helped me recover my previous realization saturation(?) I don’t know how to say it, basically colors felt a bit weird and although I spent years fixing my derealization on my own there was something a bit weird about my realization, I got used to it and it was within the range of normal already but it wasn’t my normal from before, just a different normal, like two perfectly fine TVs with a slightly different color pallette, well Latuda fixed that and gave me back my old saturation, which certainly helped with my own work on the cognitive symptoms and my peace of mind.
Hey @Pettyx thanks for the deeply insightful post. Your comment about color intensity / saturation / palette invoked my recollection of how color intensity used to be a symptom for me when I was (long ago) deeper into the acute zone of my journey. In my case, when I was hallucinating, I noticed the color intensity of things to be extra vivid and in some cases utterly brilliant in an unreal way. Later on, this was the clue I relied upon to develop the insight that maybe what I saw was somehow different from the rest of what I was seeing… thus planting the seeds in my mind to recognize then later accept that I needed help and was mentally ill. For me, the golden key, the first hint, that led me out of the maze-like abyss of the acute stage was the same kind of insight that you describe in your post. Thank you for the validation.