Intrusions

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This hunger from the doubled dose is monstrous.

Please think about backing off the antipsychotics. You're having some of the worse metabolic symptoms.

Also I have twice encountered something that the therapeutic community will not recognize but that I none the less believe to be true. It seems from my experience that antipsychotics can produce psychosis in people who were not psychotic to begin with.

This happened to me and my cousin both. On a fairly high dose of risperidone, I could not go out in public in part because I developed the belief that people could "read" my thoughts and would know from this that I was "broken" and would set themselves out to harm me. I also suffered from near-constant intrusive thoughts in which I would hear every criticism that had ever been leveled against me replayed endlessly in my head. Those have always been, and continue to be, present, but that was the only time in my life that they became utterly unmanageable.

On Zyprexa, my cousin became convinced that Satan was stalking her for her sins. She saw demons around corners and believed that thunderstorms were really the legions of Hell coming to get her.

I'm not saying they are useless for everyone at all times in all circumstances, but antipsychotics are some dangerous stuff. I don't think we currently fully appreciate the risks associated with the use of atypicals.

Thanks, but I may be somewhat different. I was on an antidepressant (fluoxetine) and a low-dose antipsychotic (olanzapine) when I developed psychosis at age 14, which caused me to do something that I vow not to repeat. Jacking up the olanzapine dose then to at least 25 mg/day seemed to make the psychosis go away. It also seemed to help me organize my thoughts better, to think through better the effects of my actions, causing a sharp decline in problematic behaviors from how I used to be. When I got off the olanzapine on my own (due to the sedation), I felt strange and detached again: the chaos had returned a little bit and my emotional reactions felt strange again. I feared a relapse and getting caught for going off the olanzapine on my own, but thankfully one never came. Problematic behaviors remained low--probably through self-training enabled by the olanzapine.

I didn't have any metabolic problems from the olanzapine then.

I go back on the olanzapine periodically if we see possible signs of a relapse, which may be occurring now. Unfortunately, olanzapine causes metabolic problems for me now.