Psychotics or Antipsychotics?

[WickedLester]

As you may have noticed, some of my posts have been a bit weird lately. I was misdiagnosed as psychotic 15 years ago and put on antipsychotic medication. For much of that time, on and off I have been trying to get off them. They truly are dreadful 'medications' to be on, they blunt your mind and ruin the chemical balance in your brain. I have now been off them mostly for the best part of a year and things still aren't back to normal for me although I am coping mostly.

The problem is when you come off them your brain goes a bit haywire and you get psychotic symptoms. To the average NHS Psychiatrist (and average is the biggest compliment I can pay some of the ones I have known) it just proves that you need them and they try to force you to take them again, for life. I understand from the reading I have done that these withdrawals may last years, especially since I have been on them for so long.

This time having been off them for over a year mostly I actually started to hear voices which is a really weird experience when it happens to you for the first time although, once again I learnt to cope with it. They had also started to abate. However, I also felt a lot sharper mentally and was amazed how quickly I could think again, I had forgotten the man I once was.

If you or a loved one are ever encouraged to take these I urge you to do a lot of reading first if possible and tread carefully and if deemed truly necessary try to keep their use as short as possible.

[WickedLester]

Another thought on this, particularly hearing voices. I came across what is known as the Targeted Individual community when trying to understand some of the tangibly weird things that happened to me, but then many of these things seem perfectly feasible to me using common technologies and priming people to turn hypervigilance into full blown paranoia. But hearing voices? The self declared TI community believe they are hearing voices because of something known as V2K or voice to skull (why not V2S?).

I was deeply confused when I first started hearing voices, how was it happening, it had to be technology. But then I eventually rationalised it. How on Earth could this be possible? Not only would you need to know the exact makeup of a persons brain down to the neuron level, but be able to fire them remotely while the subject's head moves constantly. Also in order to keep up a conversation you would need to be able to measure every neuron that fired when the subject thought from a distance and also translate this into exactly what they were thinking, all in real time. It's so implausible that the only logical conclusion people suffering from this should draw is that their own brain is a bit messed up.

My understanding is that people can hear voices under conditions of extreme stress or depression and in my case I believe it is withdrawal from long term unnecessary antipsychotic prescription that caused it. I hope and believe that in time if I stay off of antipsychotic medication my brain will restore itself, I just have to hope no permanent damage has been done.

[stewamax]

My late wife presented with Lewy body dementia.
She also had aural (but never visual) hallucinations.
The litany* of dopamine enhancers and antipsychotics prescribed had no positive effect whatever and some had unpleasant side-effects.

One exception: Donepezil (which OP will recognise as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor) has no obvious effect on cognition but extinguished the 'voices'. At the time, this was not a known positive side-effect.

She was also prescribed low dose Pregabalin (75mg b.i.d.) for ideopathic chest-pain that was later traced to a reaction to Sinemet (the standard dopamine enhancer) which even today is not a documented side-effect. But Pregabalin also had a positive side-effect: overnight restlessness and sweats vanished immediately (that night) even though low-dose Pregabalin normally takes weeks to take effect.

My conclusion from all of this is that trying low doses of various antipsychotics is not necessarily bad, but it needs continual very close observation - far closer than one would get in hospital - and the ability to chop and change or cease prescriptions to prevent adverse reactions and to recognise unexpected benefits.

* Quetiapine, Risperidone, Mertazapine ,....