[Guiness187055]

Mr doctor started hinting around about maybe trying some of the older antipsychotics. He said we would start with a low dosage. He brought up thorazine and some others besides haldol. Has anyone had any experience with these. Any luck with them?

[BeyondtheRainbow]

I took loxapine for a while. It seemed like it was going to work but before we could get the dose high enough for it to really work I developed EPS and had to go off it. It has a neat little trick that it breaks down into amoxapine which is a tricyclic AD so it is good for depression. I think EPS is fairly rare on it; for some reason I get EPS easily which pretty much rules out other older drugs. Until the EPS it was pretty side effect free.

[Nammu]

I've been on all of them but I can't recall what my experience was because it was too long ago, back in the '80's.and early '90's. I had lots of trouble with meds in those days but to be fair they were always adding high doses of ADs and benzos into the mix so it could have been the combination of meds that was the problem. About 10 yrs ago I wised up and refused any more ADs in any form and I've had less problems but they used the atypical APs. I do hear that the old drugs get good results and they use lower doses than they used to.

[still_crazy]

i took low dose perphenazine (trilafon, I think) inpatient once. Mildly sedating, got the job done. for whatever reason, I was prescribed risperidone when I left, which I found to be about as effective, but was still on patent back then. weird.

from what ive read, the problem is that docs tended to high dose the old drugs, which can cause problems for anyone, especially bipolar people. lots of td, eps, drug-induced depression, etc. some studies from other countries showed higher rates of depression and i think suicide attempts in bipolar I patients maintained on long acting injections of Prolixin and similar drugs.

id personally avoid thorazine, if you can...its low potency, so at needed doses, there's a greater risk of running into sedation, akathisia, now and then liver problems, plus all the anti-cholinergic stuff.

[HALLIEBETH87]

I take haldol daily. I was put on Thorazine during psychosis once and hated it! Haldol I can handle