How psych drugs drove my autisitic son crazy (article)

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Yeah when I see a homeless guy begging for money for alcohol , drugs or smokes I think thats his medicine not his poison. At my last jobsite we had a small homeless camp near us.

resperdal is pretty bad to i had some kind of serious allergic reation to it, and seroquel isnt much better. yah like if you want to sleep for 3 days and walk around like a zombie

as someone who has been on risperdal, abilify, and now seroquel, this thread is scaring me.

Have you had good effects from it? If a drug works for you keep taking it.

Yeah, Seroquel and Zyprexa made me spend like 2/3 of the day asleep, but hey, I like sleep. The reason I didn't like Abilify was because it made me feel really junky and weird. Like tired, but not able to sleep.

I usually keep my mouth shut when it comes to members here and their own rx's. But to be frank you, whenever I read about someone here on these meds, I am scared for them.

And the other thing about that article that's really haunting me is how IGNORANT the mental health field is, not just about AS and autistic, but in general. "Oh, he's clearly psychotic, cos he's violent, so he HAS to be on THESE drugs." That kind of one-dimensional, unnuanced, black and white thinking scares the holy crap out of me. Not to mention how LAZY it is. Honestly, I feel that psychiatrists often see these people as hopeless the minute they walk in the door, and so they never put much effort into the diagnosing and treating them. They just look at the surface, give some pills,a ndif those pills don't work, give 'em more pills.

Abilify and Geodon really helped me, I am on Abilify as of now but Geodon made me shake so bad.

There was a member in the haven complaining how he was forced to take
risperdal for his AS and my researched showed there was no placebo controlled blind study of it in persons on the spectrum. There is in others words no science backing its use last time I checked for AS. But some people do report it helps them.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... dal#562345

Last edited by TheMachine1 on 19 May 2007, 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

risperdal was the first I was prescribed, after being DX'ed with autism. All it did was make me a bit tired and hungry. Abilify seemed to have some positive effects, but I stopped taking it because of akathisia. Seroquel I just started taking yesterday. I slept really well; that's all I have to say about it for now.

I've been on virtually all anti-depressants without any positive effects. My psychiatrist is careful... he will start me on a very low dose and only increase it if there are no negative side effects. I really do hope I can find something that helps me, though I am pessimistic based on past results.

The story is a little too contrived. In this story every Aspie trait of her son is enduring. More negative traits appear in another story where she wants to push a different POV. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00544.html

It's similar enough to my story and the story of a lot of other people I know (in many cases, including mine, even right down to the eventual diagnosis of autistic catatonia) that I certainly didn't see a need to run around trying to figure out if the author was a $cientologist or not. This is part of why we have an organization called Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse, this is a widespread problem not a single exceptional case.

This is a very instructive tale. And scary. As someone who's been living with a bipolar diagnosis for several years (but, gladly, never on an atypical antipsychotic), I know a lot of people with bp. Most of the stories I've heard about their experiences with the atypicals have also been negative - not all, but most. I have a feeling that this is yet another class of meds that will fade away as more and more problems are exposed. My ex-husband was very seriously bipolar, and had very bad experiences/reactions both with Geodon and Zyprexa. The stories I've personally heard about Abilify weren't as extreme, but not good either. A pharm. company wrote to our support group, asking if anyone wanted to be in an ad for Risperdal; everyone who had tried it had been taken off of it.

My hope for this kind of thing is in the basic research being done by the NIH and NIMH on the genetic end of things; they're projecting possible meds to treat the causes rather than the solutions within maybe the next ten years. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm holding-on to hope for something.

You should be haunted. They make their "diagnosis" based on observations, not scientific fact. Those observations are subjective and if they are getting kickbacks from Pharma companies, what do you think they are going to do? It's not in their best interests for you to just have AS since it can't be treated with drugs and they can't actually give you interventions unless you have co-morbids. You are asking for it the minute you walk into their office. They are hack psuedo-doctors and I have never known even one person to be helped by them. Every single person I have ever known to see a shrink (and there have been plenty) ends up on drugs and in years of therapy with NO improvement, usually worse. This story is just one more example of their blatant snake oil methods. And these are the people in charge of research about Autism. It's disgusting.

The only thing that saved that kid was his mother, not the doctors. We should all be haunted. That could have been any one of us.

Severe Major Depressive Disorder. When my wife was on it, she was able to go for weeks without contemplating suicide (which is pretty good for her). Now that we don't have anything even vaguely resembling health insurance (medical assistance for SSA disability patients in the state of Washington is a joke, and a bad one at that), we work on just getting by with her venting to me whenever things get bad. It's worked so far, but not as well.

Yeah I'm also scared whenever I read of someone being on these drugs. I don't mind the idea of adults making informed choices to put whatever they want in their bodies (even if it's not good for them), but too often people aren't informed about the risks (or they're downplayed, or the benefits are exaggerated, or the risks of not taking them are exaggerated). And too often this is done to people who are not consenting or cannot give consent.

That's weird, because Abilify is not an anti-depressant. (edited to add: the post I was replying to seems to have vanished)

Last edited by anbuend on 21 May 2007, 10:30 am, edited 1 time in total.