Posted by bleauberry on August 6, 2011, at 16:03:01
In reply to Stopping meds, posted by sleepygirl2 on August 6, 2011, at 13:58:55
Yeah, if you went off all those meds from those doses, feeling like crap is an understatement. Landing in the emergency room wouldn't surprise me, unless you are tough and nails and can weather the storm for at least a few weeks and maybe a few months. You're right, it's hard to get out of the hole once you're in it. But we never know it's going to be hole until we try, so that stinks.
Here's another strategy. Ok it looks apparent that your meds are not helping much. If that assumption is true, then you need to try some new meds. But that does not mean you have to stop the current ones. You can instead do cross tapers. That is, lower the dose of the one you want to get rid of while introducing a new one.
Seroquel for example could go almost straight across to 2.5mg zyprexa, if you want to stay with antipsychotics. My opinion is zyprexa is a far better med than seroquel. I don't even know why they should prescribe seroquel, except maybe as a sleep med or to knock out elephants. I know it looks ok in studies, but in the real world I just don't see it. Zyprexa looks good in both studies and the real world.
Lamictal. Hmm. Ya know, even in clinical studies the best it did was prevent a relapse for up to 9 months, assuming it works in the first place. I mean, it does work magic with a few people, but hey you are at a good dose and it isn't doing that, so it doesn't look like you are one of those people and thus no reason to stay with it. I honestly don't think you would need a replacement for it, except maybe a very low dose of lithium (50mg-300mg).
Effexor would be tough. Prozac is useful when withdrawing from effexor. You could even just do a straight across swap, or do a careful cross taper. Prozac and zyprexa happen to go real well together. Whatever you do, benedryl is supposedly helpful for withdrawing from effexor.
.5mg klonopin doesn't look like too much of a problem, except maybe that it is worsening your depression. You could decrease it in tiny steps. A better replacement, if anxiety is the issue, would be xanax, since it has some antidepressant potential. There are a handful of botanical medicines that can do the same power as that dose of klonopin.
Whatever you do, decrease doses in tiny steps. I personally think that is even more important than the length of time of the weaning process. Actually the smaller the steps the longer the weaning will be anyway, so that's cool. By tiny steps I mean opening a capsule of effexor and taking out some of its contents. I don't mean gong down to the next available dose size from the pharmacy. That is too big of a step. If it is a pill you're dealing with, cut off a tiny chunk of it. The amount you decrease doesn't have to be exact from day to day, as long as the trend is basically heading downward in small steps. For me I would stay at each new step about 2 to 4 days to see what would happen before going any further.
poster:bleauberry
thread:992981
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20110728/msgs/992989.html