I am new here and am in my first year of taking antipsychotics. My doctors started me on Invega after I wouldn’t take pills because I believed that they were trying to poison me. I was on 156mg of Invega but I was getting a lot of muscle spasms and I was sleeping so much. My Psychiatrist switched me to 117mg and I am doing pretty good on it. I feel I am on the cusp of being able to be active again, but with this dose most days I feel so unmotivated and extremely tired. I sleep 12 hours or more. While some days I wake up at a decent time. I dunno…I just don’t want to sleep my life away.
So we are trying 75 mg this coming month.
I was wondering if anyone is on the 75mg invega sustenna shot and how are they doing? I’m a little nervous as I don’t want my symptoms to return. My family and I really went through a lot during my last manic episodes. I’ve alerted my family of the coming dose change and told them to watch me carefully like what I say and how I act. When I was manic I was running everywhere even inside and I wandered all throughout the woods, through town and on the side of the highway. Without getting into more details…lol I want to be more active and motivated as I want to attend school again.
Please let me know how you guys are doing on 75mg Invega Sustenna.
Hey welcome. It’s worth a shot. Sedation is hard and you get that most meds. Saying that I went from sleeping 10 hours a day to sleeping 8 simply adding some regular exercise. It really can make a difference and you’ll find with most meds they make you gain weight…Fighting that is important.
It’s worth a shot. If you see symptoms returning then that is a no brainer…but a good psydoc will get a handle on you and your symtpoms.
If you go lower than 75mg there’s a good chance you will start to have symptoms 75mg is equal to 3mg of the pills and lower than that is non therapeutic I’m on 117mg I use to be on 256mg so I went down twice and I feel exact same as on the max dose of 256mg
It’s just that since I was diagnosed with this illness (schizoaffective disorder) I’ve been on disability. I don’t want to be on disability forever. Now I feel like if I’d get a job they’d fire me for being lazy lol.
That was how I feel. I went down once and feel the same basically. So why not try going down again. I just hope that if I do gain symptoms that I can get help quickly but now that I know I have an illness and I know the signs I think it’ll be different this time.
My psychiatrist did recommend exercising but wanting to and having the energy have been hard. I never used to have to work out and I had a six pack for my entire life. Now this medicine has made me gain weight and have low energy. My family did tell me that they like this version of me. Soo I don’t know. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope that lowering the dose this time helps rather than harms me. Thanks for the reply!
It improves the more you do it and honestly. Most folk here gain weight and that makes things hard. If it’s early days then force yourself to exercise. I didn’t get dxed till I was 29. I was horribly skinny but ten years later I was a balloon. I’m still losing that weight at 50 and it’s too hard to do when your my age!
If your on these meds do it! It’s a no brainer to the older people who’ve been on them long. Biggest complaint about antipsychotics is they make you gain weight and that brings other things into the equation like less lifespan.
I’m on 75mg invega sustenna. Have been for three years or so. Before that I was on 100mg for 2 years. I’m a little overweight maybe 15 or 20lbs and the most I have weighed ever in my life was on invega and that was about 230lbs. Now I weigh around 205. I have a little belly fat and its hard to get back into shape even though last summer I had a regular running and biking routine, running 5kms every two days sometimes followed by a 20min bike ride, I didn’t lose any real weight and my fitness didn’t really improve. I did this for almost 6 months. My sexual health is pretty bad. After starting invega I didn’t have the ability to get an erection, and basically didn’t masturbate for over two years. When I dropped down to 75mg I managed to get an erection again, but most of the time it is too difficult to get an erection to even masturbate. My sex drive is minimal. For a couple years my resting heart rate was pretty high like 85 to 90 bpm but now my resting rate is like 60bpm. As for symptoms of sz the medication is doing its job and I have been stable and working for two years.
Thank you a lot for your reply! I Yes, invega has made me gain weight. I used to be 180 now I am 230lbs. So, I get your struggle. I haven’t tried to work out yet tho. My friend who is also on Invega said all he does is lift weights and he has lost weight. I did have one episode of my heart rate being extremely high and I went to the emergency room. I thought I was having or going to have a heart attack. My heart rate I believe has been normal for a long while now tho. Sometimes, I do feel like my heart is beating heavily. Like a pounding chest. It’s nice to hear that you’re able to function on 75mg of Invega which gives me hope! I’ll be starting the 75mg dose on May 7th. It’s also really nice to hear that you are working again and have been stable. I was feeling like I’d never be normal. A question for you, Before you started Invega did you have hospitalizations due to sz because you couldn’t function normally? The reason I ask is because I was very hyper and my emotions were all over the place. The voices were so bad, I began having conversations with them. I believed they were spirit creatures. And a lot of it I didn’t have memory of. That might’ve been due to the medicine they initially gave me in the hospital though. I REALLY hope this new dose still works for me. I want to have all of my energy back without a cloud of sleep following me all day.
About the sexual side effects, I feel almost as if the side effects are a sort of safeguard or relief. Before I thought about sex a lot and was always looking for someone else to date or to have sex with. It was too much. I would be doing a non sexual activity or with someone and then I would get mental images of sex or porn. Now, I can focus on other things rather than my penis. It’s given me a sense of peace knowing that if I had sex it would be difficult because it makes me not even want to try. I’ve been raised really religiously and in that sense, It’s better that I don’t have sex. I know that at first I felt like I was less of a man because sometimes I couldn’t reach climax. I really felt down on myself, like I was a joke or reduced to being a child again. Now I try to think it has made me more innocent and pure. I know my view is sort of weird but it’s helped me have peace. Have you tried any medicine like viagra or something? That could help…maybe I dunno.
Once again thanks for your reply as someone actually taking the Invega 75mg Dose!
All drugs are technically neurotoxic in a way but I dont think neurotoxic is a good word for that but dont worry about that it isnt going to damage you
I been on 78 mg dose for a half a year all the way down starting from 256 and it is just as effective for me I’m trying to start to be more active each day it can be hard I also use to weigh 180 now I weigh 225 so hopefully soon I can lose some but yeah I hope the lower dose can work for you
I felt a little better each time I would go down in dose I feel closer to normal just lack of motivation still but I know for some people there symptoms show through if they go low so to each his own
I was having side effects like muscles switching and restless leg syndrome as well the inability to ejaculate. That’s why we changed 156mg to 117mg. My side effects lessened. So I didn’t feel any difference mentally but the side effects went away.