There are meds to treat akathesia. Cogentin is the most common. If it is really bad they use a combination of cogentin and gabapentin (Neurontin). I'm not sure if they do that one and let you stay on the med though; when I needed both it was an unbearable akathesia caused by something given during surgery and nothing, including combinations of high doses of several APs and benzos together, would give me even a little break, much less stop it. And so I wound up IP and put on that combination but since I wasn't taking whatever caused it in the first place I don't know if I could have tried to stay on it had it been a "real" med for me.

I know it is so hard to go through so much to get a med to work. I've been there. Still am; if I don't have an absolute miracle in the next 3 weeks I'll be going into the hospital to get off the Seroquel that worked for me for 8 years (but was the first drug that really did and it took many years to get to it) and to go on another med that is the "med of last resort" because of side effects. I have been on at least 40 meds in 69 combinations (not including dose changes) since I started meds in 1997.

But I have had meds that worked. It took some unusual combinations and dosages and a lot of trial and error but we found things that helped. I've never been stable (I had one year that was somewhat close, at least for me) but I've been controlled as long as we stayed on top of med changes and made them pretty much monthly to keep where I needed to be. This last year that quit working and I feel like I've lost years of progress but I do know that eventually something will help you. It may require creative thinking and a pdoc who specializes in hard to treat cases but it can happen. My med list is a weird one but until a year ago it was doing the best meds can do for me (I don't get the benefits I wish I got but I do get enough to function and feel fairly well).

So there is hope. I know it's hard to go on meds and have them not work but if you keep trying them (and my experience was that trying very low doses first is important for me) someday something will work at least somewhat and you'll start to find what works for you. I know some people would think that taking the number of meds I do is wrong but I wound up with a lot of trial and error finding out I need a lot of Seroquel, a lot of Emsam, and a very little amount of some other stabilizers. Any change in that and I get worse.

You'll find what works for you. Just keep trying and don't give up. I know how hard that is (believe me, right now with really one drug left to go before I don't know what and that drug is a scary one, I am terrified to see the 21st approach as that's my deadline for our last ditch attempt at seeing if a tiny bit of lithium helps before giving up and doing the probably inevitable huge change and I don't want to do it) but hanging in there is the only way I've found to get through med resistance issues. It sucks and I'm sorry you have to do it.