I might be lowering my dose from 10mg to 5mg What was your effect from it?
I couldn’t sleep for a week, ran away in the middle of a blizzard, and landed in the hospital
Different effects…
Ranging from quitting cold turkey and trying to kill myself cause i thought i was too evil to live…or sitting in a corner of my hallway with no food and drinks and sleep thinking there was a portal through which evil monsters could enter my bedroom…
…to slowly and carefully withdrawing with mixed effects. Im feeling more myself now, more awake, more alive, but also have a daily fight with hard to bear emotions and thoughts. Things touch me more, which has positive and negative effects.
Less side effects, still enough to manage symptoms. I always end up on the smallest dose I can get because of being prone to akathisia. I think 10 mg Zyprexa is as low as I can go for it still to work though. I definitely couldn’t sit still on 20 or 15.
Last time I lowered my meds because I was pregnant and ended up delusional an having voices tell me I had to cut the baby out of me. I was 7 months along. I was hospitalized for 3 weeks and my meds were raised back up.
We have a horrible choice as schizophrenics. Do we let the disease take its progression by itself and hope it goes away or that we can live with it or take the meds get better for a while and eventually possibly die from the toxic side effects? I have chosen the meds and although I don’t want to go off of them I can tell that the meds have compromised my quality of life in the long run through the weight gain I’ve experienced that I know would have not happened or have been much slower without it. But I doubt that the poor sleep (almost zero hours per day) and the extreme psychosis (every waking second) without the meds would have allowed me to live much longer or a good quality of life when I was young and I think living with the voices would kill me faster even today. So it’s the choice I make. Lowering the meds led to an increase in the psychosis and a decrease in sleep quality in the times I tried it and I sometimes reacted to things that were not real.
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What med are you on ?
@everhopeful abilify
10mg is the minimum dose that works for schizophrenia. I.e. 10mg is the therapeutic dose.
So if you drop it to 5mg you’ll probably go bananas after about 5 weeks.
When I quit clozapine I struggled sleeping for months. When I went from 12 mg Invega to 10.5 mg I got depressed for a while. Now, I’m on 9 mg Invega and have more energy, can think clearer and feel better. Sometimes it is better to go through the process to reduce your medication. But it is hard, takes time and you need to find a psychiatrist who is willing to assist. I see my pdoc now every 3 weeks to see how it Goes.
I felt less stiffed in my body when lowered the Zyprexa. I had less side effects. But its a risky thing, yeap. You can end up more symptomatic too…
Uhm. Another one!
My feelings of connection to people seem to come back. In all sorts of ways. I feel love. I feel attraction. I feel lust. I feel sadness when others are sad. It is still very blunted compared to pre-AP. But i do feel it. That is my most important reason to withdraw and put up with the crazy thoughts.
Indeed be careful though. I also decided the people i love dont benefit from me sitting in an isolation room all terrified, because i wanted to feel love for them.
When I lower my amisulpride too much (below 200mg) I get agitation and anxiety, and suffer tension in my jaw, and my thoughts go jumbled
when i lower my olanzapine too much I get severely depressed
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By reading these stories, it’s really neat how pdocs know which dose to put us on or else we risk our sanity…