Been taking 2mg of risperidone for close to 2 months now. Depression has gotten worse. Anyone else have this experience?
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Depression is really common with sz and a good percentage take medication for it. Talk to your doctor as it’s serious business and needs to be addressed.
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Dopamine blockers aren’t going to make you feel good but they are going to make you stable and enable you to usher wellness into your life. Street drugs like amphetamines and cocaine work primarily on dopamine receptors among other things. These drugs make you high. By the same token adderal is an amphetamine and cocaine is a DRI and bupropion, an antidepressant is also a substitute amphetamine and an NDRI. Antipsychotics are also going to block the euphoric effects of dopamine promoting drugs.
Dopamine is also implicated in the ability to experience pleasure. The reason for the high rates of non-compliance and medication and disconnection isn’t simply because of side effects. It’s that medication doesn’t make you feel good in general because what they all share and have in common is that they block dopamine. That in mind depression is also common in schizophrenia for other reason. However yeah antipsychotics can obviously make depression worse. That doesn’t mean it is a good reason to come off antipsychotics. Depending on your symptoms you could reduce but personally I love taking bupropion. SSRIs should help also but yeah idk about the sexual side effects.
Depression isn’t just a neurochemical imbalance it is caused by various lifestyle factors like social isolation. Social isolation has been show to change neurochemistry and I think structural brain changes although I would have to verify the latter. Social isolation for example is common in schizophrenia as is depression. Depression is largely a product of how you construct your life, it also shades your thoughts to make everything seem hopeless so you don’t help yourself out of it.
Thinking about medication as the issue and solution for depression is the wrong context to think about creating true wellness and a long term solution in your life. However if your doctor has 5 minutes with which to take your history and work out what is going on for you then yeah prescribing an antidepressant is going to be the most time and resource effective solution.
Ultimately it is likely your asking the wrong question because you probably shouldn’t be messing and or lowering your antipsychotic. What other factors in your life control your depression other then antipsychotic medication? Answer that and you are on the right path.
I don’t plan on lowering the dose without talking with my doctor but I’ve been on this med for close to 2 months and my mood has been low ever since. There are definitely other factors contributing but I haven’t experienced a dip in mood like this with any other med. was just wondering if this has happened to anyone else.
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Yes, it happened to me, six years ago.
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I had that issue on that med too. I asked for a different med because of it. I went back to abilify.
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Its definitely difficult to find the right mix of ADs and APs for an individual. You will come to the right recipe with your drs guidance. It may help if you keep a log of how you are feeling across the different mixes that you try.
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Risperidone made me acutely depressed. I had to quit taking it. You need to change meds asap.
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Not in my case. The AD and APs I take synergistically replenish/recharge neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. I don’t get enough serotonin and dopamine. I need more. I need more and more and more and more.
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Yes，it happened to me, too, about 10 years ago. I experienced very severe depression while on Risperidone. That was a hell.
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Yep. I remember when I was on risperdal i become severely depressed. I had an apptment with a psychologist at that clinic one day and he could tell and walked me right over to the psychiatrist for an adjustment. I told the psychiatrist it was the risperdal doing it but he didn’t wanna change the med and instead just wanted me to take an anti depressant. It sucked.
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Explain your theory
Im on olanzapine and i have depression too. But i currently dont take anything for it
Not a theory. Facts. Do I need to upload my meds’ information sheets again? The meds are designed to balance out chemical (neurotransmitter) imbalances.
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I was really really depressed before the risperidone, now the depressions seems to be controlled with it sometimes.
I take invega which is about the same thing as risperdone. I have pretty bad depression. My depression definitely got worse on meds.
I was put on Invega and was diagnosed quikcly with major depressive disorder. I was also depressed on haloperidol
1. Antidepressants were oversold and painted as having more biochemical backing than was really justified – Totally true
It is starting to become slightly better known that the standard story – depression is a deficiency of serotonin, antidepressants restore serotonin and therefore make you well again – is kind of made up.
There was never much more evidence for the serotonin hypothesis than that chemicals that increased serotonin tended to treat depression – making the argument that “antidepressants are biochemically justified because they treat the low serotonin that is causing your depression” kind of circular. Saying “Serotonin treats depression, therefore depression is, at root, a serotonin deficiency” is about as scientifically grounded as saying “Playing with puppies makes depressed people feel better, therefore depression is, at root, a puppy deficiency”.
The whole thing became less tenable with the discovery that several chemicals that didn’t increase serotonin were also effective antidepressants – not to mention one chemical, tianeptine, that decreases serotonin. Now the conventional wisdom is that depression is a very complicated disturbance in several networks and systems within the brain, and serotonin is one of the inputs and/or outputs of those systems.
Likewise, a whole bunch of early ’90s claims: that modern antidepressants have no side effects, that they produce miraculous improvements in everyone, that they make you better than well – seem kind of silly now. I don’t think anyone is arguing against the proposition that there was an embarrassing amount of hype that has now been backed away from.
Not facts, obfuscation of the truth, essentially lies. This perpetuated story extends from antidepressants and applies the same to antipsychotics.
You’re going to need better then uploading your meds’ information sheet if you want to defend that kind of argument.
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It’s not an argument that you want it to be. For whatever reason. Maybe because you keep pushing supplements opposed to taking doctor-prescribed ADs and APs. Irregardless your reasoning, it is a medical fact that ADs try to balance out Serotonin and APs try to balance out neurotransmitters, especially Dopamine. Facts. I don’t need to cite articles or research sources, but if you did, you’d find out the facts. Here are two examples.
“Sertraline is known as a selective serotonin reputake inhibitor (SSRI). It works by helping to restore the balance of a certain natural substance (serotonin) in the brain.”
“Quetiapine is known as an anti-psychotic drug (atypical type). It works by helping to restore the balance of certain natural substances (neurotransmitters) in the brain.”
Why you refuse to accept facts … who knows? If you are prescribed meds, read the information sheet to learn what the meds are designed to do. You do all this online research but don’t even read the info. that comes with your meds?
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It did not work well for me I started to have severe memory issues