I don't have a lot of research on hand to offer. I wish I had more specifics to help. I'll send you links if I can find the stuff I studied when I went through this. However, it is my experience that psyc meds can cause psyc issues. They 'address' one thing and then another pops up. Doctors then prescribe a med to treat the new symptom. All the while the patient believes the new symptoms are a progression of their issues when really their problems sometimes stem from med effects. It is like a big game of whack a mole.

I had it happen to me three times. In the hospital I was put on Depakote. It made me feel even crazier and my heart was beating 160 bpm and my blood pressure was up. The doctor on call put me on Inderal. No discussion. I asked the nurse what it was for and she said 'don't worry dear, it is just used to treat your high blood pressure'. I freaked and yelled 'get my doctor. I don't have high blood pressure'. I told them I would not take Depakote anymore. I felt like it would kill me eventually.

When I was in IOP my therapist asked me in a private session what my biggest worry was. I told her it was relapse. I was very afraid of losing my mind again and hurting my kids. That seemed pretty rational given that I was psychotic and manic 6 weeks before. However, I had no psychosis, mania, depression or anxiety for the 4 weeks I had been in IOP. I was stable. The only medical issue I had was a menstrual issue caused by the risperidone I was on. That afternoon the nurse called me and told me to pick up a script for Geodon. I said why??? She informed me it was to treat the fear I had of relapse. I spoke to the doctor and said I would not be taking both as I was already like a zombie at the lowest dose of Risperidone. She yielded and developed a plan to move me onto Geodon slowly.

I was tapering off Risperidone and I started to have anxiety about something I never worried about before. I had actually never been anxious before to this degree ever. It was strange and new. I told my pdoc about it and he said he would give me something for that. I yelled 'no!' This is not me. What else could cause this. He finally offered that the Risperidone could be causing the problem and I decided to wait until my taper off was complete to see how things went. Poof. Anxiety gone.

All of these meds act as a means to activate or block your neural pathways. They target certain receptors. Our bodies use those receptors for natural functions constantly and each of us is unique. There are 100 trillion neural pathways in the brain alone and many others in the body. When healthy, our bodies and minds are good at managing the traffic load. When we are mentally and emotionally ill, we overload ourselves with certain thoughts and emotions causing electrical(thoughts) and chemical(emotions) blockages or shortages.

The notion any pill or pdoc can step into a web of traffic that huge and fix what is wrong is frankly insane to me. I understand using meds as a stop gap, but somewhere along the way we grew to believe a chemical in a pill is a better traffic controller than our own mind. A pillnwith zero integration or information from our other systems. That would be like asking an Commodore 64 computer with no connectivity to decide how to route all of the traffic on the Internet. Insanity. We lost faith in our power to heal. We stopped addressing root cause. We believe in the magic of a pill instead of resetting and working with our mind and emotions to balance and rewire. We stopped using out highly integrated internal traffic control systems.

Anyway, the more pills you take, and all of these are serious drugs with serious side effects, the more the chances are that your pathways are jammed where they shouldn't be and over active in others. Nobody really even knows what happens when you mix all of these drugs together. There is very limited data and it mostly comes from drug companies who rely upon their drugs being seen as effective. Patients having a response of somewhat better is enough to sell it. Nobody cares what happens years down the line...

You have a lot of great coping skills. You seem to be willing to face and work on some of your emotional trauma. That helps the body relearn to balance chemically and electrically on its own. You are effective sometimes, but you are fighting a chemical army.

I was not. I was only on one med that did truly help me come out of my psychosis at the time. I really needed it. But...I learned all I could and I picked those skills up and dropped meds. I'm not saying that is attainable for everyone. I just feel like if the cocktails actually worked, we would have far fewer members here. There has to be a better way. Balance is out there for everyone I think.

Slowly coming off some of these meds or lowering the doses might help you sort out which symptoms are you and which are your meds. An effort like that needs to occur very slowly and with insight. There are boards out there and resources written by people who did this for themselves. Many of them would tell you they walked through Hell in withdrawal, but the made it through. You're in a Hell of its own now anyway, right?
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