I can’t tell you Wether you should or not but for me, I really wish I could. But my psychiatrist tells me that she really doesn’t support me coming off my meds until my life is stable enough. And even then she tapers down the meds so slowly that it’d be like a year or two until I’m actually free of medication. How am I supposed to have a stress free, stable circumstantial life.
Anyway sorry to make this about me haha.
But yeah I feel if you are ready to go off them, do it. As long as you’ve got some good plans in place in case of psychotic relapse or something.
But I’m definitely no expert on this. Every time I’ve gone off my meds I’ve gone mad sooner or later.
If you already tried going off medication before and it failed, it will likely fail again. Not sure about you but thats how it was for me, I stopped meds for 2yrs until I was hospitalized but most of those 2yrs I had delusions that got slowly got worse with time until I decided to go to the hospital. I mean I could live off meds but its torture and hell.
I’ve gone off my med’s a few times, and it never worked out. Some of the things I did when I was off my med’s I can only cringe about. There are a lot of places I really shouldn’t go back to. I’m very lucky I didn’t get more permanent damage to my life during those times when I was off my med’s. Next time I might not be so lucky. When you go off your med’s it is like you are playing Russian roulette with your life. If you really feel like you want to come off your med’s talk to your therapist about it. Do it under supervision.
Yea at 2.5mg abilify you shouldn’t have any significant side effects. Abilify imo is already the best for negative and cognitive symptoms with the least side effects possible.
When I was on 15mg,it significantly affected my whole life. I was in bed nearly all day, with dark thoughts.
Now on a lower dose I still experience unpleasant things including anxiety but it is not as bad as on 15mg. That was some of the darkest times in my life.
Never had dark thoughts or anxiety on 20mg but its known to cause anxiety in some people. I wasnt in bed either, my negative symptoms were a lot better on 20mg Abilify than now on 4-6mg Risperdal.
My first psychiatrist told me that every time you quit and restart a medication it can become less effective, do it enough times and it may not work at all.
If you are stable and the side effects are minimal or non-existent then I would recommend you stick with it. Things can get a lot worse and next time there may be no relief.
I see this said a lot but I have never actually seen a study that shows this. Plus it doesn’t make sense considering modern treatment guidelines often recommend attempting to quit antipsychotics at set intervals. I think it’s a myth or a scare tactic.
It would be a pretty useless myth or scare tactic. If it wasn’t true then you could just restart it if you became psychotic again, no problem. Why bring it up in the first place?
My doctor told me about it to warn me that once I was doing good to stay on it because he had patients that felt better, quit their meds and didn’t do well.
When I was on olanzapine it made me sleep a lot, then I quit and couldn’t sleep, then I went back on it and slept but not as good. The last time I quit I couldn’t sleep again, I went back on olanzapine and it didn’t help me sleep anymore. It also became useless as an antipsychotic. I switched to Lurasidone. What happened to me is exactly what my doctor said would happen but I didn’t listen. I was just fortunate enough to find another AP that worked.