I recently started olanzapine melt tablets. I have 10mg and 5mg tablets. 7,5mg tablets don’t exist, so I’m going to try taking them every other day to equal 7,5mg on average.
Anyone else doing this?
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That’s interesting.
I don’t know if that is okay.
Have you asked your pdoc?
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I would talk to your doctor. 
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I don’t think doctors know much about this to be fair, at least not GP’s. And I can’t acsess a pdoc.
It probably isn’t a issue though when it’s the same medication being alternated. I was just wondering if anyone else had any experience.
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It might be ok if the med has a long half life, it’s best that you speak with your doctor
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Yeah. They are about 52 hours olanzapine I think.
I’m stable at 5mg so there is no risk of a relapse. I’m only taking higher doses to be able to sleep. 10mg is a bit heavy for me though if I want to be able to work and have motivation to do stuff.
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Mmmm I’m going 20/15mg on latuda as I feel 20/10mg was too much variance and not enough medication. I’m thinking of going down to flat 15mg but 15mg means I have to cut a quarter + an eighth. To make 15mg accurately I need to either get it compounded which cost and arm and and leg or grind up the tablets and capsule them. Which I cbf because I don’t have a pull cusher and microgram scales.
Personally if it were me I would just cut 15mg zyprexa to make 7.5mg and use something else adjunctive for sleep like CBD prn
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I am already taking magnesium, l-serine, tryptophan and melatonin as add on to medication for sleep. CBD isn’t legal here yet. I’m looking into pregnenolone for sleep. I might ask my doctor for that since it also possibly can be beneficial when dealing with sz. Quite a few papers on pubmed about it.
The pills don’t work well on me sleepwise, that’s why I’m trying melt tablets. Melt tablets seems to have a better effect on sleep so far.
For what it’s worth I find there is a direct correlation with ability to fall asleep on current antipsychotic dose. If you are lowering dose there is an adjustment period where you sleep less and maybe you experience more symptoms for a bit. I think when lowering if you are losing sleep but not experiencing too much exacerbation in positive symptoms then your kinda in the sweet spot re when lowering. Sleep seems for me to be the first thing to go before everything else.
Despite the long half life of aps I think the science would point towards possible advantages to depot, although that’s not my personal preference. Latuda doesn’t have a depot yet so it’s not something I’ve seriously considering. Advantages of depot might not be the case in instances where there is sleep disturbances which are very common in scz.
Idk if you have been having trouble sleeping on 5mg for more then a month I would say maybe it is a possibility that you could need more. You could take 5mg wafers and cut quarter 10mg tablets to make the 7.5mg
Cutting tablets is really the cheapest way to do things and makes no difference unless the are LA/XR
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Thanks. I might try that. I have 2.5mg tablets on hand.
From experience every medication change I make with swapping or lowering APs has been a super rocky experience. However I do get the feeling of you want to balance sedation and cognition against postive symptoms finding the right dose is a very finite thing. Maybe it’s 1.25mg extra that you need, maybe it’s the full 5mg. Doctors discourage experimentation by nature. If you only make small adjustments at a time and pace them out long enough to feel the effects then the risks don’t warrant panic from anyone. The key is that this process of feeling out the medication using small changes takes a lot of time. Say ideally for the cleanest results you can only make one change per month dosage and timing between all your medications and supplements. It’s slow going.
If you experiment a little bit around what you feel your stable dose it you will start to get a feel for what is optimal. It makes sense that you need a minimum dosage for it to work. It also makes sense not to screw with your medication. But likewise it also doesn’t make sense that everyones optimal dose comes in the increments made by pharmaceutical companies. The standard dosages and increments give you a good ball park but there is a lot of room for tailoring and finessing of the dosage that can be done which basically just isn’t. Psychiatry is definitely not there yet in terms of personalised medicine.
That said you should always run your changes past your pdoc to make sure they don’t sound insane. But if they don’t care really care whether you take 5mg or 10mg then I think it reasons that everything in-between is left up to you to figure out what is best.
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