Starlightembers: pick a couple friends or family members to give an objective opinion about how they see you acting

Thanks for sharing your story here, Erika. Very helpful and uplifting. I wanted to emphasize the bit of your message I quoted above. I'm helping my son manage his medication and even suggested he stop taking his morning dose of 5 mg of Zyprexa (he's still taking 30 mg in the evening - a large dose in my opinion). I hope we'll be able to work with his new pdoc to lower that evening dose too. We meet him on Tuesday.

Anyway I've noticed that my son doesn't seem to know when he's slipping, but I do. And my sister does. He starts talking about certain topics and having certain ideas. He's clueless, though. So I've talked to him about accepting input from those of us who know and love him about the early signs of an impending episode. It would be so much better the stop the damned thing before it starts picking up speed. At a certain point there doesn't seem to be anything to do but force treatment. And I'm trying to avoid that.

Just yesterday we were talking about some bills we're trying to pay down that mounted up during his last episode. I took the opportunity to remind him that this is a good reason to maintain control of his mind - the clean up afterward is so painful. He may find that irritating (my reminding him), but I don't want him to flip out over the stress. We can't do anything about the past, but we can try to avoid falling into the same mistakes in the future.

So if you're wanting to reduce or eliminate medications it would be helpful to have someone you trust to keep an eye out for the signs that you may need to temporarily increase your meds.