Invega Sustenna change to daily pill?

My sons psychiatrist… without warning, did not inject the medication (Invega Sustenna 117mg) but sent my son home with a prescription for 6mg pills… When I asked my son why his response was that the doctor wants to decrease his dosage… Ok,… so I have several issues with this… 1. He will never be compliant… 2. The dose is exactly the same as per the drug company’s conversion chart and 3. He cannot get the script filed because it was not prior approved… of course I called the following day and the doctor is on vacation until next Tuesday!!! Anyone know what he might have in mind by doing this??? My son has been doing well on the Invega Sustenna and he could have switched him to a lower dose INJECTABLE… I feel it’s very irresponsible and will let him know… at the same time I will demand that he order injectable… lower dose or not… Any insight would be appreciated…

Once I was in the Psych Ward because Latuda stopped working. They put me back on Invega and I thought it stopped working too and became very distraught. Then I discovered that they were only giving me 3 mg. So after taking meds in the middle of the day twice because the voices were “outside my head” I negotiated it to 9 mg. (12 mg work best for me) and got out of there. I later had it fixed to 12 once I was outside of there. Of course they may have been in the state where they were going to slowly up my dose but I’m not sure about that. I later read a report where some experiment had reasoned that a low dose was best for first time Psych Ward patients. But since I’d had it for 23 years that wasn’t good for me. I haven’t been very non-compliant on antipsychotics but I have refused to take antidepressants until very recently. I’m glad I did and sad I didn’t do it earlier. My problem was a distrust of that particular type of med because that’s what I was on when the psychosis began and a later recognition that it led to anger spells. For some schizophrenics the weight gain is enough to cause it. For others the imaginary abilities and power “lost” is a reason. I hope you can straighten that mess out because when we are determined to not take it we won’t.

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Thank you for your reply… Thing is… the pill and injectable are one and the same… so until I speak with the doc… not sure what or why he chose to do that… I say leave well enough alone… my son is doing well and we do not want him to end up in psych ward again only to start all over…if the doctor wanted to lower the dose… there are 2 lower doses of the injectable form…I know from reading … all meds work differently for everyone… but after he began taking this…he has done remarkably well…

Very True… I think he had a TOTAL lapse in judgement!!!

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I hear of some drugs being injected by the full ampule e.g. a full 1ml or 1.5ml. But like with me and what they can do to lower dosage is just not inject the full ampule like for example I get 0.6ml of 1ml.

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Easy to manipulate cause they get all kinds of perks… vacations etc…this I know first hand…

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My son is too strapped for time but I am NOT… Always investigating things online and I refuse to allow him to become a victim of what the doc or drug companies think is best…Those reps/companies should know better since they have seen the repercussions of promoting some of their drugs and what they have done… as with the opiate/heroin problem going on…

Lol… after I re-read my response I realized that I did not mean that my “son was too strapped for time”… and knew what you meant… My son expressed to me that he does like the injectable and as a matter of fact was just approved 2 weeks ago for another year of the injectable… He does not like being disturbed at 7:30am for his meds and will forget them if left on the counter if I am not home… so it limits my activites as well…He is just not regimented and as with most meds… to have ultimate benefit of levels of medicaation… it must be administered around the same time daily… I am on Synthroid so my levels may be all over the map if not for the fact that I take it same time every day… So yes… he has expressed to me that the dosage has sexual side effects and affects his libido but there are 2 doses lower than what he was taking that arae by injectable…Just freaks me out that this doc can play around with my son’s wellness…My son… who will turn 30 next week has signed consent that I may speak with his doctor and I will be seeing him Tuesday when he returns from vacation… so that he can explain his bizarre reason for this change…

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Also wanted to include that he continues to smoke pot… adding to being complacent… not good when one is supposed to be on a regimen of taking a pill on a daily basis…