Pressure to go back on meds (abilify)

Just like most of you guys, my psychosis started extremely suddenly and within a week, i did a 180 and my parents noticed very quickly. Talking funny, acting funny. Anyways, they call the police and they come and pick me up and take me to the hospital. i run away from the hospital and end up in this womans (in her 30s) house hallucinating.
Get taken to court where I declare my name is “Michael Schumacher” (f1 legend)
so then I get ordered to a hospital. refusing all food and medications because the voices were telling me it was poisoned.
My parents come to see me, and my father was the one who convinced me to take the medications, and in a few days I had been discharged and bailed out as I have no priors.
I’d like to say that in this week, I went from 175 pounds to 145 ish. I’m 6’2, so imagine that.

Put on risperidone (from 1 to 4 mg) for the next few months and that was the worst time of my life. I had a court ordered curfew of 10 pm but didn’t even want to leave the house during the day, so it could have been house arrest, it would have barely made a difference.

had a marijuana problem too, so i decided to stop the meds and go back on my greens. no job, received disability soon after.
i can quit the marijuana, but i’d rather live life without medications.

they just change me… any anti psychotic, makes me feel weird. i was a highly energetic kid all my life, and still am.

outside of the psychosis where i experience every symptom, (amazing hallucinations and delusions) now I just hear voices, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts about every hour.
don’t want the doc to find my “cocktail” of pills. just like i don’t want to depend on marijuana i won’t depend on this medication.

i guess you could say i’ve gotten used to it. just need to accept that this is one of my struggles in life?
how do you guys cope? and your views on medications?

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Umm I hate to say it, but the cocktail method of medication, although it takes time, trial and error and patience, is the most likely to just practically cure you of psychosis- I does for me, and it doesnt make me lethargic, just sedated, but caffeine perks me right up. I am into powerlifting, and that just kinda proves that not all antipsychotics make you lazy and dead feeling. I just drink a preworkout supplement and I feel ready to lift really heavy ■■■■, and I do.

But try different meds, dude. You might just find that the newest ones work with minimal side effects. I take Geodon which was made in 2003. Ask for the least sedating meds, I pointed out to my doc that I just cant live with being completely sedated, and Geodon just makes me require a cup of coffee in the mornings, but most people drink coffee every morning anyways, so I dont even mind.

Medication can work like magic. It does for me. I take Geodon, Xanax and a blood pressure med, Propanolol. They all work to cancel the side effects of each other and keep me from being psychotic and having anxiety attacks which trigger psychosis.

And why would you want to just cope when you can be treated? I coped with schizophrenia for a year, and I became an alcoholic. Sure, I made A’s and B’s and kept my scholarship, but I was absolutely psychotic and miserable, and quitting alcohol was lots of fun.

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Ha. I don’t know. I feel this schizophrenia is incurable.
Our bodies adapt to the drug, therefore we need a higher dosage to get the desired effect. Same with any substance really, we develop a resistance to it.
I’m just not down to take it for the rest of my life. Which will probably be the case here, I know it.

You should just keep taking Abilify. I’ve taken it for over 8 years and never developed side effects, and never had problems with needing a higher dose. Some parts of me question that it works so well, but it does work.

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You dont know what youre talking about, dude. We dont build tolerance to antipsychotics like recreational drugs. I’ve taken Drug and Alcohol Behavior (the honors section) and not all drugs work like that.

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Anti psychotics.

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Maybe we are the lucky ones to find antipsychotic that works,it also took me 5 years to find a meds that work…if this stays on I would nv wanna get off meds

I don’t know if it is a tolerance buildup but for some medications can stop working after being on them for extended periods of time. Sometimes a switch to a medication that didn’t work in the past may work in the future.

I am an active person and right now I’m on a good combo of meds that I need. Latuda/ Seroquel and Xanax.

It’s not the hallucinations or the voices that knock me down. I’ve learned to cope with those and continue to do so. It is the negative symptoms. I was so apathetic I could barely move or talk, so depressed I couldn’t see living, so unmotivated I couldn’t think to eat. I need the meds. It’s because of the meds, I’m not a zombie. I have a job, I do still surf and swim, I am meeting people.

I still need the meds. If I’m going to make it through my day and have enough motivation to keep my job and hence my place and my insurance, then I need the meds.

None of the meds worked when I was still on drugs. I got high, missed a dose, got higher to stop the symptoms I got from missing a dose and missed another one and before you know it, full psychosis and court ordered hospitalization and rehab.

It’s a spin cycle and it will keep flinging you round and round until you do something different.

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dude. it’s biology.

“Antipsychotic dependence typically appears as the patient’s body begins to develop a tolerance to the medication.”

there’s no difference between recreational drugs or non-recreational drugs.

did you know that people used to take very small doses of cyanide and after a while developed a resistance to it, and when people tried to poison them, they wouldn’t die. our bodies adapt dude, doesn’t matter whether it’s abilify or crack or xanax…

big pharma is dirty man, it’s for control, to make us like ■■■■■■■ sheep… that’s just my opinion, and i’d rather die on my own terms, whether that day be tomorrow, or X years from now…

not to mention long term side effects, such as losing brain mass, facial ticks, and god knows what else.

the first time i took risperidone, .5mg. I woke up in a haze, much like after smoking weed all day. by the 3rd day, that haze wasn’t there. that’s building tolerance. because the body becomes familiar with anything that you put in it and it gets used to it.
now presume you become psychotic on these meds… the only way to get you out would be
a) raise the dose
b) change the medication
c) jesus

i’ve read this page up and down. that’s the conclusion i’m drawing. don’t believe that you can’t build a tolerance to anti psychotics, cause that is simply not true. i don’t care what you learned in class.
my doctor told me when i asked “well, we’re not exactly sure how anti psychotics work”