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N&PD Moderators: Skorpio | thegreenhand
Hypersensitive to everything .... brain damage ... akathisia 4x
- Thread starter Tallblue
- Start date
And he would be right, you're not allergic to everything, it absolutely is anxiety causing a nocebo effect (i.e. the opposite of a placebo effect).
Akathisia is a common reaction to dopamine antagonists, yes, but if a single dose is causing you symptoms for weeks, then it's not akathisia, it is nocebo/paranoia. Maybe you were suffering from akathisia for the first night, then the sleep deprivation was causing you paranoia, maybe the lack of sleep even made you slightly manic, and it spiralled out from there.
What you just described sounds exactly like anxiety.
Go see a therapist about your anxiety.
Also, go see a psychiatrist. Ask to be put back on klonopin, (.50mg per day isn't a high dose, after all), along with other antidepressants/atypical antipsychotics/mood stabilizers (tell the doc how you know you're susceptible to nocebo when it comes to new drugs, so it might be better to try out new meds along with klonopin in order to reduce your anxiety during the time it takes for the other meds to manifest their positive effects).
Whatever you do, DO NOT READ THE PACKAGE INSERT/PATIENT INFORMATION LEAFLET, and DON'T TRY TO LOOK UP ADVERSE SYMPTOMS ON THE INTERNET. You would just be giving yourself nocebo again. You're not going to get significant akathisia from 25mg of seroquel at bedtime. Being restless because you're anxious about the meds is not akathisia.
Accept the fallibility of the human mind while it is suffering from an insufficiently treated mental illness. No one is immune to the placebo/nocebo effect.
Well I would have to disagree. But I am not surprised at the answer. Many people get akathisia from other sources and chronic lasts for up to 6 months. I found out it was akathisia by my 4th time. And I would have to disagree with you on the anxiety claim or to go back on benzos which over time is not good for anyone. Its funny you get hurt by a medication and the only "help" is to further hurt them. I am seeing one and was traumatized by a drug reaction and no help. The PTSD is caused by how I was ignored and treated.
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sekio
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2009
- Messages
- 21,994
If you're going to edit your post to remove any sort of information on what happened and how, we can't help you.
Anxiety can produce a pretty wide spectrum of physical maladies, if you feel even mildly upset at your situation it's worth considering anxiety/nocebo. You can't rule them out for sure without blind testing (or some simple tricks, e.g. effects that appear instantaneously after dosing medication rather than taking 15-30 mins to hit are one sign, effects that don't seem to line up with the drug's duration of effects etc...).
Also, not to belittle you or anything, but PTSD is a little more involved than "I had a bad response to some medication and the doctors were mean to me". Usually the stressors are a little more "life and death".
Anxiety can produce a pretty wide spectrum of physical maladies, if you feel even mildly upset at your situation it's worth considering anxiety/nocebo. You can't rule them out for sure without blind testing (or some simple tricks, e.g. effects that appear instantaneously after dosing medication rather than taking 15-30 mins to hit are one sign, effects that don't seem to line up with the drug's duration of effects etc...).
Also, not to belittle you or anything, but PTSD is a little more involved than "I had a bad response to some medication and the doctors were mean to me". Usually the stressors are a little more "life and death".
I apologize. For editing my post. And the PTSD was not from a doctor being mean, it was from a long time of negligence for a car accident which started this whole thing. I'm not explaining it well, just that I had brain damage from a car accident and ended up with bad care,
Car accident (I was a pedestrian hit by a impaired driver) brain damage from hit hitting a brick building and crushed leg from the car. 16 years old.
Seisures
misdiagnosed with anxiety
more seisures
Finally grand mal in front a bunch of people.
EEG - Grand Mal during test
Finally phenobarbitual
off pheno 5 years later they think mybrain rewired.
young daughter died 1 1/2 years old.
benzos Ads
taper
Akathisia 4 times none prior to benzos
adverse reactions to beta blockers (and I never expected it I took them previously but not since the wd)
So yes akathisia traumatized me I never knew something like that existed and how horrible it feels.
I really regret taking that benzo. One of many regrets of my life to take it that long.
Sekio.
Thank you for being kind to me. I am going to mention the nocebo to my therapist. I already know what panic and anxiety feel like because of my loss, as time went on my anxiety got better to where it has been 4 years since a panic attack or anxiety. These events that happened feel like a different thing plus the physical effects.
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Yeah, I just looked it up and apparently sometimes akathisia can persist for weeks or months, my bad. I'd argue it is still not all that common, though. I mean, keep in mind that even something listed as a "common" side-effect in a patient leaflet only affects between 1 and 10% of patients (atleast as per the EMA's and WHO's definition). To have this happening from several drugs with different mechanisms of action would make it exponentially rarer. Placebo/nocebo effects, on the other hand, tend to affect pretty much everyone to some degree, and people who are in a mental state of crisis even more so.
Look, I'd be the last person to suggest that clonazepam is a panacea, but in a person where a debilitating degree of anxiety caused by past trauma prevents any sort of successful treatment (either because it causes them to reject medication due to nocebo effects, or they refuse to see a doctor at all), its use at low doses (like 0.5 mg per day) can easily be justified, unless they had massive problems with abusing this drug in the past. If you're that worried about the risk of addiction, you might also look into lyrica (pregabalin), which is highly effective for generalized anxiety symptoms (less so for panic attacks, though), but has very little abuse potential when compared to benzodiazepines.
atara
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2010
- Messages
- 2,786
Take a sedative,
no wait that didn't work,
have a different sedative,
oh crap there's a side effect,
so try this other sedative,
I wonder if you'll ever get out of bed?
"Historically, the predominant mental manifestations of akathisia have caused confusion. Haskoves,3 who originally described the syndrome in 1901, concluded that the disorder was of hysterical origin. Bing4 viewed akathisia as a “psychosis” characterized by a “morbid fear of sitting down,” but in another chapter he explained it as a way of overcoming the muscular rigidity of Parkinson's disease. Oppenheim5 considered akathisia as a form of neurosis, “usually a form of phobia.”
The most important part of that paragraph: all of those authors described akathisia before the first antipsychotics were introduced. Akathisia is not only a side effect of drugs; it is a condition of the mind. Therefore, akathisia is also not a reliable sign of any effects of a drug!
Since you are not currently on antipsychotics sufficient to cause drug-induced akathisia, it is more rational to attempt to address psychogenic akathisia.
The most likely treatment is the following: drink a coffee in the morning and go for a long walk sometime during the day. Doxylamine, an anticholinergic available as a generic sleep-aid, may be used in the evening, at a level of about 25 mg and certainly not much higher. Seroquel is overkill unless there are other symptoms present.
no wait that didn't work,
have a different sedative,
oh crap there's a side effect,
so try this other sedative,
I wonder if you'll ever get out of bed?
"Historically, the predominant mental manifestations of akathisia have caused confusion. Haskoves,3 who originally described the syndrome in 1901, concluded that the disorder was of hysterical origin. Bing4 viewed akathisia as a “psychosis” characterized by a “morbid fear of sitting down,” but in another chapter he explained it as a way of overcoming the muscular rigidity of Parkinson's disease. Oppenheim5 considered akathisia as a form of neurosis, “usually a form of phobia.”
The most important part of that paragraph: all of those authors described akathisia before the first antipsychotics were introduced. Akathisia is not only a side effect of drugs; it is a condition of the mind. Therefore, akathisia is also not a reliable sign of any effects of a drug!
Since you are not currently on antipsychotics sufficient to cause drug-induced akathisia, it is more rational to attempt to address psychogenic akathisia.
The most likely treatment is the following: drink a coffee in the morning and go for a long walk sometime during the day. Doxylamine, an anticholinergic available as a generic sleep-aid, may be used in the evening, at a level of about 25 mg and certainly not much higher. Seroquel is overkill unless there are other symptoms present.