After weeks of horrific insomnia which is inexplicable except that it may be a side effect of my Risperidone, I have been prescribed Trazodone 50mg. I understand that is a very conservative dose. I just got it today and have yet to see if it helps me. She said if 1 tab doesn’t work, I can take 2. But what if 2 doesn’t work? I am not very optimistic after trying Melatonin, Excedrin PM, Diphenhydramine etc. Trazodone is actually an anti-depressant that is prescribed off label as a sleep aid. I didn’t know that. Any positive (or not) experience with Trazodone as a sleep aid? Also what dose do you take?
I am on both Risperidone and Trazodone. I currently take 100 mg of Trazodone. 50 mg just wasn’t enough for me. The Trazodone works well. The only thing I don’t like about it is that sometimes I feel lethargic during the day. Overall, I think it’s a good medication. I hope it works well for you.
The first time I took trazadone I became angry as soon as I woke up. I was unwilling to take it again until they added trileptal to control the anger. It’s a decent sleep aid but I’m also on a anti-anxiety pill that’s likely helping with the sleep so it may not be doing it by itself.
@Blizzard I take Trileptal as well. I also take Vistaril for anxiety. Neither help me sleep but, hopefully, the Trazadone will help me sleep. I wish she hadn’t been so conservative with the dose (50mg) but we’ll see…
I kept upping my trazadone and landed at 300 mg trazadone for sleep…it’s not harmful at that dosage…50 mg wouldn’t help me at all.
Trazodone is great, it’s very well-tolerated by most people. Dosage varies from person to person. 25 mg is enough for some people, I’ve taken up to 600mg/night. (yes, prescribed) You can get a bit of a hangover effect, but that usually goes away if you reduce the dose a tad. It’s not really much of an antidepressant, though.
I have the same thing and I am also on risperidone. Do you also never actually feel sleepy? I just close my eyes until I inevitably fall asleep. They put my on 150mg of trazodone but don’t notice anything about it. I think that I’m going to talk with my doctor about it. They prescribed trazodone to me after I stayed awake for 5 days straight. One of my problems seems to be that I don’t dream and I don’t feel groggy anymore so I just wake up alert nowadays. It kinda freaks me out.
I sure hope 50mg does something for me tonight. As a general rule, I’m sensitive to medication, hence the 1mg of Risperidone but my insomnia is a beast to deal with. If 50mg doesn’t work and I’m still awake a couple hours later, I’ll take another tablet. I just hope I don’t find out the hard way that even 100mg isn’t enough.
I take vistaril occasionally for anxiety. I also have klonopin on hand for severe anxiety but I don’t take it except as a last resort (maybe once every 6 mos).
I have trazodone on hand as a sleep aid. I don’t often need to take it, but it seems to work well when I do take it. I usually don’t have any side effects from the trazodone but a couple of times I did have night sweats.
@SP2342. I am wired like I took amphetamines but I (obviously) haven’t. It’s from being so sleep deprived. I used to sleep on my Risperidone/Trileptal combo and it doesn’t work for me now. I wonder if the Vistaril is causing it. There is a small chance of insomnia with Vistaril. I read it in the side effects. When I first took it, it made me tired but…I dunno? I’m not sure what to think about my situation. I have had insomnia for 25 years but not like this. This is a whole new animal with no known cause. My meds make me really tired but don’t make me go to sleep. I lay in bed for 12 hours hoping desperately that I will fall asleep until I finally give up. After I have been up for awhile I start getting that wired feeling. I think it’s from exhaustion. Here’s why: I was hospitalized for exhaustion 25 years ago after going without sleep and as it got really bad I became wired like the body/brains last ditch effort to keep up. In other words that high/wired feeling comes on when the insomnia is really bad and you’re extremely sleep deprived. I have even cut out caffeine at all in the hopes it will help me get some shut eye. I will let you know how it goes tonight with my first 50mg dose of Trazadone.
I just took my nightly cocktail adding in the Trazodone and minus the Vistaril in case that’s the problem. I took 1mg Risperidone, 600mg Trileptal, 50mg Trazodone and, for good measure, even though it’s pointless 10mg Melatonin. Here goes nothing…
Well, hopefully you get some sleep tonight. 
Nada on the sleep. Took one Trazadone tab at 9pm. Nothing. Took another at11:30. Nothing. Took 2 more at 2am. Nothing. I did not sleep at all last night. At 6am I went to the ER and told them I haven’t slept more than an hour or 2 in 2 weeks and that for the last couple nights, I haven’t slept at all. They sent me off with an Ambien CR script. I now have 5 to work with before I see my ‘regular’ Dr. So as not to throw my sleep cycle off, I need to stay up all day today and take my first tablet tonight. I am SO tired and SO tired of not being able to sleep. It’s the Latuda I have been trying to taper onto. It doesn’t like me… I am done with that stuff. Anyhow, let’s hope I get some sleep tonight.
From my experience and from what I’ve heard about it, people react very differently to this drug. For some people 50 mg of this drug will put them into a deep, deep sleep for twenty hours. Then others have to take a few hundred milligrams of this drug for it to have an effect on them, and for other people this drug has no effect on them at all. I tried to kill myself using Trazodone. I took 4500 mg of it. The drug didn’t do a thing to me.
Try to communicate with a health care professional about the melantonin and the other meds you’ve been adding to try to sleep other than what is prescribed and ask about the other pills previously prescribed because you may find some night that you may sleep and never wake up. I was in that situation once when I was on Latuda as I once took melantonin, l-thenanine, benadryl, and possibly a few other meds in an attempt to sleep. I kept adding on meds and the result was they would work for a time then stop working. I was playing my own doctor and didn’t get relief until I started communicating about it. Technically the trazadone I take now is the only sleep aid in my pill bottles although the tranxene helps with the anxiety that contributes to the problem. I’ve slept OK for about a year now and don’t load up on drugs like I used to. I hope you can do the same and not lose any more sleep over it.
Once I get the Latuda out of my system, I may be able to use the Trazadone. Hard to tell at this point. Latuda causes me hardcore insomnia. I can’t take it. Sticking with my Risperdal
Trazodone used to put me to sleep. Now when I take it it seems to do nothing.
I took the Ambien CR last night and skipped my AP. I got about 4-5 hrs of sketchy sleep but I’ll take it over no sleep. Tonight I will take my Risperidone, Trileptal and the Ambien and, hopefully, it will work for me. I’m here to tell you that Latuda can cause bad insomnia. I was reading on other boards and, apparently, many people have experienced insomnia on Latuda. Too bad. I wish I could take it because maybe I would lose some weight. As it turns out, I can’t wait until that crap is out of my system. Maybe when I am cleared of it, the Trazodone will work for me. I don’t know.
I’ve been dealing with poor sleep and disturbed sleep for sometime now where I’m half awake and half conscious throughout the night if I don’t take something for sleep. I was taking diphenhydramine aka Benadryl to sleep and it was working really good until I started getting blood in my stool and constipation which it can cause as well so I went to my psychiatrist and told her about it and she prescribed me trazodone 50mg.
I took it last night and ended up waking up a couple of times during the night and today I’m seriously feeling jet lagged. So today I’m going to take 2 - 50mg pills as told to me by my psychiatrist and hopefully I get a deep sleep and feel good tomorrow.
It just doesn’t seem to stop with all these problems. First schizophrenia, then depression, then sleep problems, then the side effects of the medication, then high cholesterol, high liver enzymes, and then blood in my stool. I wish it wasn’t so difficult because sometimes I wish for death because my quality of life seems to be deteriorating. Hopefully tomorrow I wake up not feeling like sh!t for the whole day and get some good sleep.