It's a baby!
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2007
- Messages
- 652
I just found this great thing called the Icarus Project. And I thought it was worth sharing, as so many of us have received diagnoses such as Bipolar, Schizoaffective, etc. Particularly those of us who are Americans.
I've been going through some stress myself because I am taking an antipsychotic to manage "drug induced psychosis". I have friends here who went through the EXACT same thing, eating mushrooms and going crazy for a few days. One of them went to jail, one of them was involuntarily institutionalized and is now on a lot of antipsychotics at a dose that is too high. He wants to get off of them but the psychiatric resident who is his only doctor (no insurance) will tell him things like "you have something wrong with your dopamine receptors and these drugs are correcting that imbalance" - an objective falsehood insofar as there has been no "if a, then b" discovery in the relationship between brain chemistry and mental illness. There are twins in which one twin ends up schizophrenic and the other does not, usually when one has a much more stressful life than the other.
I'll just quote from the introduction to their manual on psychiatric drugs to give you an idea what the project is like and where they're coming from:
"This is a guide I wish I had when I was taking
psychiatric drugs. Prozac helped me for a while, then
made me manic and suicidal. I was sick for days after
coming off Zoloft, with counselors telling me I was
faking it. Nurses who drew blood samples for my
lithium levels never explained it was to check for
drug toxicity, and I was told the Navane and other
anti-psychotics I took to calm my wild mental states
were necessary because of faulty brain chemistry."
Exactly! I was put on Prozac when i was 14. It gave me severe akathisia within about 48 hours so I stopped taking it. When I tried to tell my pediatrician that the drug gave me akathisia, she thought I was being melodramatic because "it takes six weeks to work". Which is both true and false: the antidepressant effects, the 12% advantage over placebo, take six weeks to kick in, but SSRIs start inhibiting serotonin reuptake within a few hours of the first dose. And I ended up institutionalizing myself at 19 due to a psychotic state. They kept upping the dose of antipsychotics until I was on 20mg/day, a dose typically given to serious schizophrenics (people dealing with old-fashioned bipolar mania are typically on 10-15mg of this drug, abilify).
I was so "sedated" and so out of touch with my emotions that I was secretly Suicidal. So I stopped taking it entirely, which is not safe, because I experienced a pseudo-psychotic state (it wasn't Psychotic because I knew the things I was experiencing weren't real, but basically I kept having delusions of reference which I kept consciously rejecting). So I started taking it again at a quarter the dose it was prescribed me.
The Icarus Project isn't pro- or anti-medication, it's pro-patient's rights. And since we're all into harm reduction here I just thought I'd share this excellent resource.
http://theicarusproject.net/HarmReductionGuideComingOffPsychDrugs/
Edit: also I wasn't trying to trivialize anyone's diagnosis by putting "mental illness" in quotation-marks. I was just trying to emphasize how ambiguous and wonky the diagnosis of mental illness inherently is.
I've been going through some stress myself because I am taking an antipsychotic to manage "drug induced psychosis". I have friends here who went through the EXACT same thing, eating mushrooms and going crazy for a few days. One of them went to jail, one of them was involuntarily institutionalized and is now on a lot of antipsychotics at a dose that is too high. He wants to get off of them but the psychiatric resident who is his only doctor (no insurance) will tell him things like "you have something wrong with your dopamine receptors and these drugs are correcting that imbalance" - an objective falsehood insofar as there has been no "if a, then b" discovery in the relationship between brain chemistry and mental illness. There are twins in which one twin ends up schizophrenic and the other does not, usually when one has a much more stressful life than the other.
I'll just quote from the introduction to their manual on psychiatric drugs to give you an idea what the project is like and where they're coming from:
"This is a guide I wish I had when I was taking
psychiatric drugs. Prozac helped me for a while, then
made me manic and suicidal. I was sick for days after
coming off Zoloft, with counselors telling me I was
faking it. Nurses who drew blood samples for my
lithium levels never explained it was to check for
drug toxicity, and I was told the Navane and other
anti-psychotics I took to calm my wild mental states
were necessary because of faulty brain chemistry."
Exactly! I was put on Prozac when i was 14. It gave me severe akathisia within about 48 hours so I stopped taking it. When I tried to tell my pediatrician that the drug gave me akathisia, she thought I was being melodramatic because "it takes six weeks to work". Which is both true and false: the antidepressant effects, the 12% advantage over placebo, take six weeks to kick in, but SSRIs start inhibiting serotonin reuptake within a few hours of the first dose. And I ended up institutionalizing myself at 19 due to a psychotic state. They kept upping the dose of antipsychotics until I was on 20mg/day, a dose typically given to serious schizophrenics (people dealing with old-fashioned bipolar mania are typically on 10-15mg of this drug, abilify).
I was so "sedated" and so out of touch with my emotions that I was secretly Suicidal. So I stopped taking it entirely, which is not safe, because I experienced a pseudo-psychotic state (it wasn't Psychotic because I knew the things I was experiencing weren't real, but basically I kept having delusions of reference which I kept consciously rejecting). So I started taking it again at a quarter the dose it was prescribed me.
The Icarus Project isn't pro- or anti-medication, it's pro-patient's rights. And since we're all into harm reduction here I just thought I'd share this excellent resource.
http://theicarusproject.net/HarmReductionGuideComingOffPsychDrugs/
Edit: also I wasn't trying to trivialize anyone's diagnosis by putting "mental illness" in quotation-marks. I was just trying to emphasize how ambiguous and wonky the diagnosis of mental illness inherently is.
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