Why on earth are schizophrenics so frequently not fully compliant?

It took me 16 years to accept my diagnosis and fully get my need for meds and although mostly compliant I was so reluctant and almost thought I needed it but basically wanted to be rid of it
I don’t understand us

The argument that a diabetic would take injections never occurred to me to be a very good parallel
I don’t get it
How much suffering do we cause our families with all the umming and ahhing

There are plenty of non compliant diabetics. It’s less of an issues with schizophrenia and more of an issue that no one wants to accept that anything is wrong with them.

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During my first hospitalisation I was adamant I was not ill and therefore questioned why I needed meds. I took them though.

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We want to be able to manage ourselves. We don’t want to have other people in charge. It offends us.

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I’ve been very compliant throughout my illness and it’s paid off very well for me. I’m one of the lucky ones.

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Fear set you on edge, trust is cheep when you been betrayed, truth is, you are a animal wounded and you have a defence system inside and the more they hit on you the longer it take to hill.

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Well to me that’s easy, a psychotic person doesn’t believe anything is wrong with them. We think the rest of the world is crazy for not seeing what we see and “understanding” what we do. I was against meds for so long because I simply didn’t believe I was ill.

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I don’t really mean when psychotic… I mean when well and reluctant to take them or coming off them because we don’t want to take meds, or generally the attitude to something so life-saving that we depend on them
Why not just accept we depend on them a as soon as we’re turning the corner and accept its for life ? I’d think the traumas of a first psychotic break ? Shy isn’t that enough to convince us? Why don’t we believe the psychiatrists?

I think it can be for several reasons (1) Lack of insight- anosognosia ie inability to see you have an illness (2)Rebelliousness. I had a spell of this when an inpatient and sent to live in a half way house with in the hospital grounds. We had to collect and take our own medication. Due to being peed off I would regularly not take it (3)Difficulty remembering to take medication. A problem that necessitated me going on a depot. (4) Side effects. For some the side effects are so bad that non compliance becomes the preferable course of action.

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I kept leaving them off because I felt better when I first left them off. The side effects of the medicine took away my sense of self. No matter how miserable I became without them - it was me.

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For me, the notion of lack of insight in one’s condition does not quite explain the non-compliance all the way. Maybe it does so in the long run, when someone has been taking them for months and notices no difference, but it seems there is something missing here to explain the resistance to even trying meds once. When I was struggling with accepting medication, it wasn’t just that I thought I didn’t need it. There are many things in my life that I thought I didn’t need but took nevertheless, including drugs…

In this episode, I did not have a neutral attitude towards the medication but rather an extreme aversion to them. This I think is not fully explained by the appeal to anasognosia only. For I also had this aversion towards meds to help me sleep, while I did acknowledge I needed to sleep very much. To me it seems it was the paranoia towards the people that offered me the medication. I thought these people were up to no good and I thought these medications would be the end of my life. It was very much the people who offered them to me, and my paranoid perception of their intentions, that made me resist the medication, rather than medication in itself. To illustrate: there was a point in this episode that I had a strong aversion against any meds that were offered to me, but did very much want to take medication that I had kept from a previous episode.

I don’t know why, but in psychosis for me many things become matters of life or death, you know, like everything is at stake. Whereas normally I might think ‘I might as well try it’, in psychosis, the only outcomes seem to be life or death. And medication offered by others was seen in light of the latter… whereas I perceived of what I had tried before as trustworthy and as a lifeline out of the situation.

I always resented the med’s because they weakened me physically and mentally. Also, all the typicals made me feel just plain bad, especially Haldol. I’ve finally accepted that I have to take medication, and fortunately I have med’s that aren’t so miserable to take. However, if they tried to put me back on a typical I would probably choose to live on the street and be psychotic.

It’s interesting how different people react to different meds. I take a depot typical (depixol). It is my favourite med. share your sentiment on haldol though - that stuff was dreadful

There are people in my family who don’t have schizophrenia who are not 100% compliant with their meds or try to find alternatives to the scripts. I also had a relative who looked on the Internet for an alternative to getting something done about his back pain and learned to find a reference to putting a tennis ball in his back pocket which has so far worked. As LED said normies do it too.

So, so much. Families need the ability to force meds on non-compliant SZs. I’ve only ever met one non-compliant SZ on here with what I would consider having working recovery.

NOT of the insulin dependent variety. They usually die within a month. The non-insulin dependent ones are guaranteed to suffer all kinds of diabetic complications if they’re stupid enough to not manage their disease and WILL die sooner.

Pixel.

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I’ve been fully compliant since day 1. Unfortunately there are no good meds for my ailment.

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The medications suck. If something is going to make you sleep 16 hours a day, make you gain 60 lbs, take away your ability to even masturbate, and possibly even more and worse things, then you’re probably not going to want to take it unless you are sure you a getting a huge benefit from it. A lot of people don’t notice any big benefit from it, so of course they just see it as poison. Then often people with psychosis illness have to try to work, can’t hold down a job if you’re psychotic, can’t hold down a job if you’re so sedated you can’t focus or hardly stay awake. Lose-lose.

I think it’s important to stick with treatment when it’s necessary to avoid harm to self or others, but people who act like compliance is so simple and easy are assmonkeys.

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Oh ok. Maybe because the bad side effects? Because when you’re not psychotic then it’s like “well I’m not having any symptoms and these meds suck soo”

Just throwin my thoughts out there

Zyprexa is like that, but the med I’m on it’s not. I can masturbate, I can work, I can go to school, I can read, I’ve been losing the weight I gained on zyprexa, gave me the shakes but Inderal covered that.

Not all meds suck and they’re a godsend for people like me for example.

Be careful with the anti-med talk, you’re just wrong.

And I don’t think compliance is easy and simple, but I’m an assmonkey that agrees that meds are the recovery route to take.

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Because I keep on thinking im not sick anymore when im on meds and feeling better. Then when I go off I get sick again.