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Originally Posted by Tower_Tusk
I'm not smoking. I was given an antipsychotic. I've been on abilify for about a month though of course the dosage was upped since then (when I had my dying delusion.) Initially, for the first few weeks I was home though, I was on nothing at all except the 1 clonazepam in the morning and 1 at night.
I am still somewhat delusional, and I can't stop seeing "signs" that everything I thought was true everywhere. I don't think I've hallucinated at all recently it's just I keep seeing things happen and being like "that's part of it I know it!" The delusions are however interwoven with depression at my inability to do my familial and social duties properly. I have experienced so many delusions I don't know if I would even feel it if one or two went away.
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OK so I remember this phase basically you have psychosis and its not because of the drugs although they may have triggered it. Were you depressed before the psychosis? Basically I'll run though the possible dx's for you. Psychotic depression is when you get super depressed and that triggers psychosis but you never have psychosis without being depressed. Bipolar is when you cycle between up and down and you can have psychosis only when you are experiencing a mood symptom not on its own. Brief psychotic disorder---psychosis less than a month. Schizophreniform, psychosis more than 1 month, less than 6 months. Schizophrenia psychosis at least 1 month with continuing functional impariment for greater than 6 months. Schizoaffective---basically like schizophrenia with bipolar combined.
There are also some other things---like delusional disorder if you only had delusions. It wasn't clear to me if you had hallucinations.
But the basic gist is they have to watch you for at least 6 months to make a diagnosis---for me I asked my pdoc at 6 months whether I had schizophrenia or not and he said---I don't know. By that point the meds had blocked everything----so he couldn't tell whether I had underlying symptoms or not. Basically no dx is a good dx---if they tell you something more than psychosis is going to be inherently bad but it took 2 years for them to tell me I was going to be fine and its going to take a total of 3 until they are sure I'm "sane" again even though I've been off the meds for 3 months. Also lots of people here get a changing dx so if they call it too early its meaningless---opps developed mood symptoms you just went from sz to sza---just like that. It's really not that predictive. Honestly most the research out there is based on schizophrenia so even if you don't have the full thing its helps to read books about that.