What medication worked for you? What did it help make better? How much did it help? Did it make everything go away? What were the side-effects? How much did you take? How long did it take to work? How long did it work?
Many questions…
Zyprexa 20 mg : made me land on my feet again. Insight. But I got rapid heartbeats and low blood pressure. Had to stop taking it.
Flupentixol 4 mg : made me a zombie. But for the first time my head was quiet. Did not want zombie pill so I stopped taking them. Bad idea.
Abilify 20 mg: ni side effects. Maybe memory loss. Dn if it is sz or Abilify. I have voices and paranoid thoughts. Have now.
Quetiapine 300 mg: makes me sleep. Have now.
Medication has worked for me. I was on a hefty dose of serquel and yes I knocked out my voices… my feeling of loosing control, my glitching, my panic… it swung me into a waking coma it feels like. I was gaining weight, I was having some tardive dyskinesia, I was very sedated.
But then that got cut back dramatically and Latuda got added… I’ve been on this for two and a half years… I’ve also been in Therapy.
But meds first… I got my energy back. The tardive dyskinesia started to fade, my concentration came back. I also got switched to xanax for panic… now on to valium for panic.
The therapy helps me get some perspective and helps me talk it through.
The voices are pretty non-existent, except when I’m getting stressed. The paranoia is easier to fight off and the worst for me is the negative symptoms… those have really faded for me.
Meds and therapy have saved my life.
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Difficult to tell. My family believes that it was the medication, 15 mg of Abilify, that has been keeping the symptoms away in my recovery. Having been through the illness and recovery myself however I must honestly say that it is very hard to say whether or not this is true. I know for most it is finding a medication and the correct dose of this that seems to do it. But I truly do not know, my recovery just seemed to happen, I’ve been stable and symptom free for over two years aside from a mild recurrence of symptoms two months ago that lasted two weeks before subsiding again.
It’s honestly a mystery to me. All I know is that I am nowadays symptom free and am grateful of this.
Took a few years to get here but most benefit with 600mg quetiapine nightly and depot flupenthixol 60mg fortnightly.
Far from perfect but quietest mind yet.
Plus a cocktail of other meds for coexisting mental conditions but the above for pure psychosis (if that makes sense).
Risperdal has worked wonders for me - Abilify worsened my condition (or did not work ) The other meds were not helpful or there were side effects - high blood sugar, hypothyroidism etc… I liked Seroquel XR but had to get off of it because of side effects - Zyprexa worsened my condition - side effects -and it was like taking a sugar pill. Invega interacted with another med that I was on. One of the first typical antipsychotics I was on, Navane gave me a lot of EPS and basically turned me into a zombie (I was on a higher dose?) The meds helped - and they have hurted - it is all one big balancing game. I can live without therapy, but medications are a must for me
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Are you taking valium(benzodiazepine)at a daily basis,isn’t it going to be addictive or build tolerance?@surprisedj
Geodon works for me. I am also prescribed xanax and propanolol. Geodon gets rid of my positive symptoms, it really works to make me sane, not hallucinate and think straight most of the time. It turned my life from a nightmare into a dream. It does pretty much make it all go away. But last night I thought a couple watching me my friends at a bar were psychologists observing me as a recovered schizophrenic. I recognized it as a delusion and then just thought of them as a couple who were paying too much for their drinks and should have bought the beer from the grocery store, unless they like people watching that much.
Back to the questions I was answering, I take a little less than the max dose of Geodon. So if I lose it again I have the option to take more. If I were on 160mg, the max dose, instead of 120mg, I would have absolutely zero symptoms but I would be too doped up, sleep too much, not want to do anything, ect.
It took me a few months to find the right dose and combination of meds. It didnt work for about 3 months at 80mg, then it worked alright but it made me depressed and constipated so I was prescribed 60mg. â– â– â– â– hit the fan when I tried Latuda instead of Geodon, I was immediately put back on Geodon and twice as much. Then I got side effects, sedation and akathisia (extreme restless leg syndrome) and so I was told to drink caffeine and put time aside to sleep 9 hours a night (I just woke up from 9 hours of sleep and am having a big mug of coffee), been doing this for almost a year now. It still works after about a year.
I hope it continues to work. By the way, propanolol was first given to me as an anti-anxiety med, I used to take 20mg before going to class. I was moved up to 80mg extended release every day to help the akathisia and keep me from having anxiety attacks or fits of rage. My symptoms made me enter fight or flight mode, and my brain usually picked fight, which made me irate and want to scream and break things, which I did on a few occasions. If I didnt get angry, I would get anxious as hell and have diarrhea, sweat and feel my heart race. Neither is acceptable, so I take my meds.
But 60mg Geodon with breakfast and dinnner (120mg daily), 80mg propanolol ER with breakfast, 1mg Xanax every 6 or 7 hours.
So far no medication has worked for me.
Art is the only thing that reliably makes things better.
The meds sometimes reduce the symptoms I have but not by much.
No, i did not make everything go away.
There are many side effects of the meds I take but the ones that effect me are: restlessness, zombie like personality, constipation.
I take 15mg Abilify, ??mg Celexa, ??mg Gabopentin
It takes about 30 min to kick in and lasts from 8am to about 10pm.
Invega and its cousin Haldol have both worked for me in eliminating weird beliefs, which were basically the only symptoms I had, although I had weird beliefs badly enough that they were life threatening to me. The starting dose down to the extreme lowest dose always worked for me. Problems only came back one time, when my psychiatrist weaned me off of medications entirely. The medications seem to help almost immediately, and I mean within hours, but it has taken up to 2 or 3 months to get all of the weird beliefs out of my head after a psychotic episode that started when I was on no meds. How long have I been on medication? Almost all of 7 years.
Side effects? Enough has been said about that so that I don’t feel like adding anything. Medications have side effects, and many of those side effects are listed in the information given by the pharmaceutical companies; but, in my case, the side effects are better than dying, in my opinion.
Let’s see… I was on Seroquel, Zyprexa, Clozapine, Risperidone, Haloperidol, sulpiride and amisulpride, and out of all those meds, risperidone and amisulpride worked the best.
I take 400mg amisulpride now (a moderate dose), and it helps with agitation, voices, thought disorder and self-harm urges. Lately, however, I had a relapse on the meds (due to stress) and they aren’t working as well. I see my pdoc in a month and if my symptoms aren’t gone, he will probably up my med dose a bit. The side effects on amisulpride are much less than some of the other meds, only have lack of sex drive and increased appetite, can’t feel much else happening. I’ve been on amisulpride for over a year now. If I miss a few days’ dose, I begin to feel it - I get anxious and agitated. It has helped a lot with my anxiety, I don’t get panic attacks on it.
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My medication reduces my “positive” symptoms, but does nothing for the “negative” symptoms or for my problems with concentration and other cognitive problems. It also doesn’t help with the chronic fatigue and hypersomnia that I suffered from prior to experiencing psychotic symptoms.
I was on Xanax. It was building up… and feeling less effective… so I was asking for more…
My doc didn’t like where that was going… So I got switched to a lesser mg of valium and it’s under very strict watch. I have a feeling I’m going to get switched again. It’s only been 8 weeks on the Valium now. So far, I’m doing ok.
I have been on geodon and seroquel for a long time now. They stop the hallucinations and even out the emotional roller coaster I get on. They drain me a physical strength, though. They make me a lot more susceptible to hyperthermia and hypothermia. I mowed the lawn today and the heat really took a toll on me.
@shadow2000,are you sure your on the right combination of medication?fatigued can be helped by modafinil type of meds and negative symptom might be your depression or deep laying anxiety which you might wanna treat,I had all problems your facing seriously
@Mobc1990
I’m taking the only antipsychotic that I’ve found to be tolerable, and that’s Abilify at 5 mg.
As far as your suggestion for modafinil goes, I’ve tried a related medication (adrafinil) with my Abilify, and it just worsened my psychosis to an unacceptable degree.
I do experience some depression, but I don’t think that that’s the cause of my fatigue, which I experienced for seven years before the onset of my psychosis. Despite what certain professionals told me back then, I don’t think that I was depressed then. I experience some depression now (at least at times), and knowing what depression feels like, I can say that I experienced something much more insidious then and still do to a certain extent now.
At any rate, there’s really little point (at least in my estimation) in arguing over whether I’m suffering from a chronic fatigue or a chronic depression, because I’ve tried every treatment for depression that I think would be reasonable to try, and none worked for me in the long run.
Seroquel: 25 mg at noon, 25 mg with supper and 600 mg before bed. It’s all instant release (not the XR stuff) and it has so far kept me relatively stable throughout the day and able to sleep without voices and never-ending scattered thoughts and thought loops. So for me, Seroquel is a big winner.
Prozac: 20 mg in the morning. This stuff takes time to start working (like two weeks). It started to work for me then after a several more weeks, I felt alive again. I tried Effexor XR with bad results, but for some it’s way better than Prozac.
Clonazepam: 0.5 mg twice a day for anxiety. It works quickly enough and well enough, but over time the effectiveness decreases and you need more. Does anyone know a better medication for anxiety that doesn’t have this problem?
Sorry to hear that @shadow2000 ,I have got these problem you mentioned especially anxiety,just a question,your only taking low dose of abilify,it’s like it’s for depression,why not take the recommended dosage which works as a antipsychotic?for least three months,maybe you see changes?
no. i only had social anxiety when i believed in telepathy. now i know that the voices come from my own mind i no longer suffer with that. despite trying 6 different meds, i still have voices. i think i always will to be honest. having 2 children, there are a lot of meds that i just can’t try as i have to b able to get up at 6am to sort them out and stay up late till they go to sleep, so my options are limited med wise. plus, i’ve worked soooo hard to lose 2 and a half stone so i won’t b trying anything that causes weight gain either.
@Mobc1990
Do you think I haven’t tried a higher dose of Abilify? I’ve taken 10 mg, and the fatigue at that dose was unbearable. I couldn’t even stand to wait in line for my medication at the hospital when I was taking it because I could do nothing else but lie down when I was on 10 mg. If there was any way I could tolerate a higher dose of Abilify, I’d be taking it.
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