When the meds don't work

What do you Do to cope with your sz?

It can take time to find the right meds. There are a ton of meds out there and unless you’ve tried most of them you can’t really say they don’t work.

Different med’s can affect different people differently. A med that knocks one person out for twenty hours might not do anything to another person. I’ve found this to be true of a couple of med’s - Trazadone and Stellazine. Maybe if one med doesn’t work for you there will be another one that will. There’s a certain amount of trial and error involved.

I hear you. I’ve been on about ten different ones the past eight years. I was doing great on Abilify, but lately my symptoms have been terrible. I feel like I’m stuck in a cycle where I do good on a med, then my body builds up a resistance.

Indeed, everyone’s brain chemistry is different.

Keep working with your pdoc to find the right meds for you. I wish you the best.

Alternate subject line: When the meds don’t work right away.

Recovery from schizophrenia is usually an incremental process. Best advice I can give is to be patient, stick with it, and give your doctors a chance to sort your meds out.

Cheers.

Pixel.

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I always wondered about that , meds should at the very least , slow down your thinking…

That’s what I thought too. They seem to do the opposite to me. :confused:

I don’t cope well at all.
I had a nuclear wig out at work.
Just returned back. I was afraid if they would take me back.
But I’ve been there over 16 years and they can just forget about all that, I hope.

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Finding the right meds take some time. I’ve been on risperidone three times, fanapt, latuda, invega and now haldol. The doctors really wanted the invega to work so they had me on injections and 18 mgs of pills of invega

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I know I am a broken record, but I keep running this all down because so many people seem to believe that meds are the “complete and final answer.” For a small %age of sz patients, they may be. But most sz patients need to get at the causes of sz and not just the symptoms. One cannot do much about the genetic causes, but one can do plenty about the environmental ones.

Piles of research show that sz pts tend to get “better” when they…

  1. Get a copy of this book and read it and have their families read it, as well.
    http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Schizophrenia-6th-Edition-Family/dp/0062268856

  2. Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
    https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/

  3. Work with that “psychiatrist” (or “p-doc”) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking.

  4. The best of the therapies for that currently include…
    DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
    MBSR – Welcome to the Mindful Living Blog
    ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
    10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing

  5. the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
    MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
    SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
    SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia

  6. or standard CBTs, like…
    REBT – Rational emotive behavior therapy - Wikipedia
    Schematherapy – Schema therapy - Wikipedia
    Learned Optimism – Learned optimism - Wikipedia
    Standard CBT – http://www.beckinstitute.org/what-is-cognitive-behavioral-therapy/About-CBT/252/

  7. If you/she/he needs a professional intervention, tell me where you live, and I will get back to you with leads to those services.

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Are you sure? There are so many APs , Are you saying that your APs speed up your thinking?

me too I am a little bit like this… I think that meds don’t work enough, really… I go more often outside but that’s all… I remain so paranoid outside, its hellish… some adviced me to try them for more time-3,4 months… they slow the thinking in fact. since how much time you are on them? I would really like to believe that we just need time…

Thank you very much for the help. God bless you. I’m feeling better today. Like all peoples with this illness, I have my good and bad days.

I just did some soul searching, and I think it’s more of how strong I make my coffee, combined with nicotine consumption.

I hate going outside too. I’ve been on different AP s for about seven to eight years. Thankfully where I live at in America it’s getting wintery. Therefore I can stay inside my apartment and read my philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy books. And be loved by my beautiful cat :slight_smile:

but do you have the desire to go out? cause me, I do… I wanna feel the sun, breathe air, just cross the streets and to feel beautifull… but when I go outside, I just stare at my shoes,i wear sunglasses and I avoid watching the others. I know the stuff with the winter though :wink: for me, its related with the fact that I can hide easily then in all those clothes that we wear :slight_smile:

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That’s where I was in 2002 and early 2003. So I went outside and did just that (well, not “feeling beautiful”) Every Single Day. Added to the “beginning, baby steps psychotherapy” I was getting then (at the veterans’ hospital I could walk to from my board-and-care near it), I got better, albeit slowly. Had I known then how to use the workbooks I learned about in about 2006, I known I would have gotten better a lot faster. But getting outside – and out of my head – was crucial.

Just observing to notice to recognize to acknowledge to accept to appreciate what was going on Out There.

Here’s a song that sums it up metaphorically:

cc: @Sarad (so you understand what’s going on here) (and has a bass line in the second section Duro will love if he doesn’t know it already)

Hahaha I hear you.