Just a thought...

Post Reply New Topic

There is a med out that stops tardive dykenesia for people who take psychiatric meds. I wonder if this could help people stop stimming. ????

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved treatments for TD that have been studied in well-designed clinical studies and are recommended as first-line therapies.  These treatments are valbenazine (Ingrezza) and deutetrabenazine (Austedo).

Stimming is a method of self-soothing...why would one want to stop that?

While stimming is sometimes subconscious, it isn't electrical. It's emotional, and serves a positive purpose. If someone has stims they are unable to control under any circumstances, it might be something else.

Stimming may start as an anxiety management tool. However, some stimming may become pleasure stimulating and begin to take on addictive qualities. Drugs may reduce anxiety or create a fog that dampens pleasure. However, if a particular stim is socially unacceptable or contributes to an addictive process, a substitution method may be more effective than a drug process.

Stimming is very different from tardive dyskinesia. TD is involuntary movements caused by a lack of dopamine in the basal ganglia. Stimming is voluntary (or sometimes habitual) self-soothing movements, and is more linked to sensory differences rather than anything to do with motor control.

A medication that reduces TD would probably be effective in treating Parkinson's disease, and possibly helpful for tic disorders such as Tourette's syndrome. But it would have no impact on stimming.

Unlikely. Most people who stim, if their stimming is not inhibited and their overall environment is stable, will not show the classic escalation pattern of an addictive behavior. The closest I can think of to addictive "stimming" is self-harm in people with mood disorders or borderline PD, and it's arguable whether self-harm due to those conditions actually counts as stimming.

Tardive dyskinesia has nothing whatsoever to do with stimming, as stated above.