What happened when you stopped your meds?

Post Reply New Topic

I recently stopped my meds and am now coping with a disaster. Basically I stopped everything else, and got shut off notices, and my house is even more of a mess, etc.
Have you ever stopped meds? what happened?

Oh
also I get kind of hyperactive and do a million things at once, like start dozens of forum topics while writing about the meaning and purpose of life and emailing dozens of people about the twenty new things I discovered this morning.
I'll stop now.

What meds? You're being really vague. I know when I got off Prozac and Adderal I felt better because I was no longer dependent on any meds.

As soon as I stopped taking the medicine I was taking to stabilize my moods I noticed that I was able to hear things in the music I am working on that I didn't notice before. My extreme sensitivities returned. The bad side is that now when I am mixing I keep trying to EQ out the noise from my computer that I never even noticed before, so now the PC noise problem has to be solved. I also seem to experience more anxiety and less sleep, but it's worth to me it if it makes a difference in the mix, assuming I will ever be awake enough to actually get any mixing done.

While still under the misdx of Psychotic NOS, I took myself off the antipsychotics and improved VASTLY. But this was because they were the wrong meds for me.

I also was taking Paxil about six months ago to help me through a rough period in my life, and once that was over I slowly took myself off of it because I know that my depression tends to be situational (i.e., sh***y life happenstances = depressive episode). So once that was over, I very slowly took myself off Paxil, my psychiatrist complaining all the while and telling me I'd probably have to go back on it once it was out of my system. I am glad I know myself better than a psychiatrist (and a really unexperienced one at that.)

But just in case life gets sh***y again, I know that the Paxil is there if I need it again.

I have stopped my meds a few times(teenage rebellion ) the result was always disasterous. I hate the way I am without my meds...that person is not me...that's my...evil twin or something. I'd do a whole lot to be able to remain on my meds. Without them I swear I would go crazy. I also get depressed when I go off my ADHD meds, and have all sorts of nasty mood swings and uncontollable giggling. I'd better stop listing what happens now...I'll scare everyone away, LOL!

When I got off one medicine I would be either extrmely hyper,extrmely angry,extrmely happy(lol),or extemely depressed.

SpaceCase

This just might be the one place where that is unlikely to happen.


Was that the Risperdal?


I'm off of the Anafranil again because it's still not working properly. I had always relied on it in part to control my inhibitions. So when it stopped working, I didn't have much control of my impulses (and it showed in my posts for a while). I've gotten better about that, but my parents seem to frequently be short on patience with me still. My mind is focused on my obsessions round the clock and I have trouble managing time without it. If I were to go off of the Welbutrin too, my Tourette's would get worse, my moods would become unstable, and I would probably end up in the hospital. I wanted to revilt against meds as a teenager (and even earlier) too, but I always fet ike crap when I did it and my parent's were always kept track of how often I took it when I tried something like that.

Pharmacies are having problems getting Welbutrin where I live right now, so I'm using the extended release samples that my doctor gave me in an emergency right now, and it works like crap so I'm not feeling like mysef at the moment.

My doctor is looking into Mecamylamine to help control my Tourette's. Right now I am on nicotine therapy (lozenges) for it, which helps A LOT, but has some uncomfortable side effects and isn't covered by medical assistance. The nicotine has helped mostly with major seizure-like/convulsion-like attacks and twitching, but it seems less effective with minor symptoms like facial contortions, palilalia, blinking and pulling at my clothes. It has calmed those symptoms down, but not to the extent of the other ones, but that could be related to the dosage.

I guess I'll be more specific. When I first got off my Adderal, my immune system weakened (I got flu) and I had a lot less anxiety. Other than that, nothing really changed. It turns out that meds like Adderal no longer affect me, yay!

Prozac was a bit harder. The first thing I did was get depressed(suprise! ). Like after my Adderal, I had a lot less anxiety. Also, my sleeping problems were gone.

Pill free since '03.

After 7 years of ritalen and concerta, I started having what I think where psychotic reactions (paranonia, anxiety, etc) and I stopped taking them.

I find that simple tasks are much harder (cleaning, hygienge, homework, etc) but I would rather deal with that than continue taking that stuff and losing it completely.

For a while I was on Paxil, Risperdal and Wellbutrin for depression and anxiety. I got off of them all at the same time... they were tapered and everything but I still had withdrawal. It was horrible. Easily one of the worst experiences I've had. I got really sick like I had the flu, I was extremely agitated and twitchy... if i was standing, i'd want to sit down, but if I sat down, I'd feel like I needed to stand. It was like being insatiable in every aspect of my being. lol. I had that full-body "ZAP" sensation every few minutes as well. My teeth chattered. My psychiatrist denies that all this was because of the meds, but I'm 99% sure it was. There are so many stories on the internet that sound JUST like what I experienced for it to be anything else. I know that what I felt was nowhere near as bad as what a drug addict would feel getting off some "hard" drug, but it was still a most unpleasant few months.

You'd be suprised

I dare you to try me. I haven't been getting the meds I need, so my brain chemistry is so completely F.U.B.A.R. right now that I could probably relate to just about anything you could throw at me.

The poll doesn't have an option for what happened to me.

I went off psych drugs (at the time, it was mostly Seroquel, Lithium, and Wellbutrin, but I'd been on several other things in the same drug classes and others before that, and had been for about four or five years), slowly even, and the resulting withdrawal symptoms were horrible. Pain, confusion, disorientation, illogical thinking, my mind felt dark and empty, increased movement problems, unmasked tardive dyskinesia, emotions all over the place, toward the beginning occasional brief hallucinations, just generally bad.

But after I stuck it out -- the absolute worst part of which took three months, then another pretty bad three to six months, then gradual improvement over years -- things started to get way better than they'd been before.

This is important because some people are told that if they experience withdrawal symptoms from these kinds of drugs, it is a sign of a "re-emerging mental condition", and that this is in fact the only possible thing it could be. That's what they were claiming it was for me. In my case, it was a sign of withdrawal from these drugs. If you experience withdrawal symptoms, it doesn't mean the drug was right for you, any more than withdrawal from any other drug your body gets used to necessarily means the drug was good for you.

I'm not making anyone else's medical decisions for them here, but these facts are very often overlooked -- it's assumed that if you really don't need something then going off it will be relatively painless. Going off these drugs was horrible at first, and not something I'd ever want to have to repeat, but it was also the right decision. But if that's what someone decides to do, there can be a period at first (which varies in length from person to person) that is highly unpleasant.

anbuend, I experienced something similiar to you though not to that extreme of a degree when I went off of the 1000mg of Seroquel, the 40mg of Geodon, and the 60mg of Paxil all at once. A very long month of extreme night sweats and just one messed up brain, not to mention lethargy.

I am so glad I'm off those. I bet you're glad, too.