I’ve had no positive symptoms outside of one episode that lasted a few days, several months ago. I’ve gone down to 1 mg Abilify (for more than a month) and the positive symptoms have not come back. It feels like my negative and cognitive symptoms have worsened though. It seems that I meet the criteria for major depression. I am worried that the latter two are due to the medication. And the reports of brain shrinkage and metabolic issues due to antipsychotics are worrisome. Of course, I will also discuss with my psychiatrist.
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73% of szics experience negative and cognitive symptoms before being put on meds and diagnosed. I read a study about it, I can post the link if you really want.
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I experienced negative and cognitive symptoms 3yrs before my 1st psychosis and before being diagnosed.
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no. ive seen people make posts like this a million times and a few months later theyre always in a bad place. maybe its overconfidence
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I’ve been on APs for about a quarter of a century and there’s no brain shrinkage that they can find. I suspect people worry about that too much. That being said, if your doctor thinks it’s worth tapering off, then why not? Medical oversight is the big thing.
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Yea and they think stopping meds will make them 100% functional like before sz. All I have seen is that most of them got worse than when they were on meds, others remained the same and didnt gain any improvement in functionning.
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I think you know best, better than anyone here, what’s right for you.
For me, coping will always be more important than medication. It might help with some symptoms, but it’s not going to change your thinking patterns, or how you handle stress.
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whatever changes you make i would do them very slowly and i would not advise going off everything entirely. You were off medication at some point (before you were prescribed) and obviously things weren’t good then so…
I agree with stopping meds in order to pursue some other treatment like holistic, therapy, or something-- addressing the issue somehow.
Simply stopping will almost always have the same result. Something needs to change.
Thanks for your input everyone. I’ve been reading books like Mad in America, Anatomy of an Epidemic, and The Bitterest Pills (which is specifically about antipsychotics) which are all very anti-psychiatry. Has anyone else read these? Somehow I have a hard time just trusting what my psychiatrist tells me and always want to do my own research.
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It is probably the meds controlling your positive symptoms. If you stop taking them the positive symptoms may come back. Going off your meds is a roll of the dice.
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Sorry but thats garbage.
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Be very wary of anything produced by them. They make their money by preying on vulnerable groups by using misleading data and intentionally misinterpreting results to reach false conclusions. They do this because they want people to buy their products. They want people to stay sick and keep looking to them to get better. They are exactly what they accuse the pharmeceutical industry of being.
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You’re much better off just going by your psychiatrist’s guidance.They have knowledge and training. Also have to say that some of the material you’ve mentioned is … funky. If a real psychiatrist thinks it’s a good idea for you to taper off your meds with supervision, cool. Not something I suggest experimenting with on your own. All of my attempts have crashed, some pretty badly.
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Some of it is, but if you look at things as a dialectical process (which you probably don’t) you have to make arguments against something established for there to be any progress. Most importantly progress in terms of better treatment(s). Some anti-psych like scientology is completely what I’m against.
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While you are doing your research, you should also look at what people with training and experience say about that book
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From the article:
“he recommended that such individuals be treated with “love and food and understanding, not drugs.” In the present book he recommends as treatment “rest, psychological therapies etc.” (p.19). Other than reciting studies showing that antipsychotics change some brain structures, as would be expected from an effective medication, Whitaker completely ignores the more than 100 studies demonstrating brain changes in individuals before they have ever been treated with antipsychotics.”
I haven’t read the book ( I don’t read as much as I used to) but I take this argument to be fairly progressive antipsych. It should be noted that it’s perfectly hegelian that anti-psych be a little crazy in the argument making, so saying that the meds cause sz when in reality its only after stopping treatment that usually happens, is good enough. Then he argues for alternative treatments which are morally good arguments even though they’re not effective against sz like meds.
Is it a little dangerous to make a sz patient think he was given sz after being medicated? Maybe but arguments need people to make them and if pdocs have patients who read the book saying “I was admitted when troubled and you gave me sz”, then the squeaky wheels may get the grease of alternative treatments.
1 mg of Abilify is nothing. I see no reason why you can’t go down to nothing from that point. You might as well not be taking it at all at that dose. That being said, no one knows if you will have positive symptoms eventually from being off meds. There really is only one way to find out. Good luck.
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The debate about what causes the brain shrinkage associated with SZ is a widely debated topic, and as far as I have seen, different studies have results that lean different ways. I can tell you that, as a brain tumor survivor, I have had MRIs every year from age 16-22, then every 5 years after that. Brain shrinkage showed up on my scans after the emergence of my psychosis, but before I started antipsychotics.
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I was in Soteria House an alternative treatment for schizophrenia. Their tenet was that they could treat schizophrenia without medication or hospitalization. They rented a big house in the middle of a residential neighborhood and staffed it with young, personable counselors who had no experience in the mental health field but were friendly, open minded, and empathetic. They stuck 6 to 7 of us in there and basically we just sat around and the counselors mingled with us and listened to whatever we had to say. They called it “normalizing the schizophrenic experience.” The counselors weren’t there to judge, just try to understand. The founders of Soteria House claimed a success rate better than hospitalizations and meds. There critics thought the opposite. I was there a year and I have to say, it didn’t help me at all and I regret being there. I also have to say that most of the counselors were almost as screwed up as the clients.
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i think no matter the circumstances the majority of the forum will say no, you should not go off meds
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