Misc abilify - good or evil?

[invisigone]

i met my new pdoc today, he wants me to change seroquel to abilify.

obviously i have read the the official documents and what i could find on the net, that is not my question. i want to ask if anyone here has taken it and personal opinions of it, especially reactions/side effects/personal opinions/dangers. it seems likely to cause insomnia? i have read that if it works it is a miracle drug and if it don't work then it don't work at all.

obviously i am not looking for a professional medical opinion, i am looking for a layman's opinion. at the end of the day, the decision on whether i change is mine and the doc is fine if i don't want to. i would rather trust the opinion of one person here who has actual experience of abilify than trust 100 patient information leaflets.

 

[4sak3n]

I was on a 5mg daily dose for about 2 years. This was a pretty low dose but I nevertheless experienced positive effects while on it. I was scripted it for depression (not what it is usually prescribed for) and it certainly helped me a lot. When on it simple problems were no longer insurmountable obstacles but rather more realistic molehills. Simple existence was no longer a constant drain on my mental resources and willpower. In short, it worked adequately.

I didn't experience any side effects while on it (possibly due to the low dose) however the first 2 or 3 months after I started were REALLY hard for me. While my body acclimatised to the drug I was constantly overcome by an intense restlessness. Think RLS but over your entire body as well as your brain. It was not an increase in energy but rather the intense and overwhelming psychological urge to be constantly occupied and working, like an itch that I couldn't scratch. At night I would pace my room, almost at the point of claustrophobia when I had never ever felt the slightest hint of it, filled to the brim with the urge to get out and do SOMETHING, anything. This restlessness gave me intense anxiety until I finally pinpointed the cause: Abilify. Ultimately the restlessness went away as my body grew used to the drug and, apart from occasions when I was under a lot of stress, never came back. This side effect was not, to my knowledge, in the literature so it is seemingly exceedingly rare but my psych was not surprised or perturbed by it.

Ultimately I got off Abilify because of the cost when I changed medical aid plans and they no longer covered it.

All in all it was a much more stable drug than Sertraline (Zoloft) which I was also on for a few months. And by that I mean that the side effects were a lot less noticeable and the results more uplifting and positive.

Please note though that apparently the effects vary a lot depending on the dosage level. What happens at 5mg might be very different to that which occurs at 20mg.

 

[The.Ghost]

I'm one of those people for whom it's a miracle drug. I have BP-II and chronic dysthymia. Before starting the Abilify, I had major depressive episodes quite often, a bit of hypomania here and there, and frequent mixed episodes. Baseline for me was mild - moderately depressed.

Then I started the Abilify, and it all changed. At 2mg / day, my mood lifted and I finally felt "normal" (or what I assume normal feels like) at baseline, starting about a week in. The major depression became less frequent over the coming months, as did the hypomania (which I really do miss, TBH).

But the biggest thing it did for me: it stopped the mixed episodes. Since I started taking it, I've only had a handful, maybe one or two a year, and even then they've been much milder than they were before. This effect is the reason I will likely take the drug until the day I die, price be damned. Anyone who has BP will understand. For the rest of you: mixed episodes are the reason BP-II has a twenty-something percent suicide rate, as opposed to around 2% for major depressive disorder.

Over time, my dose went from 2 to 5 to 10mg / day, and baseline has slowly gone from "normal" to "meh" with mild depression. My emotions have also mostly disappeared, although I consider this a good thing overall. Oddly, the drug had a stimulating effect for the first month, then a sedative effect, then it became neutral; all this was at 2mg and aside from those first two months, has had no effect on my energy levels since, despite the dosage increases.

I sometimes say that I'm only 3 years old, because that's when I started the Abilify and my life began.

But remember that every drug has a different effect on everyone. I have no idea what it does for unipolar depression, but if you can afford it, I'd give it a shot.