- Hi, everyone.
Welcome back to the Living Well with Schizophrenia channel.
If you're new here, my name is Lauren,
and I make videos about what it's like living
with schizophrenia or Schizoaffective disorder.
And today I'm going to be talking in this video
about my experience with a recent med change
as well as just kind of talking about when you might need
to think about changing meds
and how to go about doing it.
But first,
if you wanna help support the creation
of videos like this one,
please make sure to check out our Patreon page,
the link is in the description below.
So you may have noticed that we haven't posted
in a little while
and this is because everything
that I'm going to talk about in this video
happened very, very recently,
and it was something
that I was kind of grappling with
in terms of changing meds really recently,
and I was kind of going through the throws
of navigating that
and through the difficulties of doing that,
and so I'm gonna talk more
about what that was like for me,
but I just kind of wanted
to give a little bit of an explanation
for our small hiatus.
Okay, so in terms of my experiences with med changes,
I've had...
I've been on quite a variety
of different medications in the past,
over the last 10 or so years.
And so there's been a lot of instances of med changes.
And so it's kind of a process
that a lot of people are living
with a mental illness have to go through
at one point or another.
And so I'm just gonna talk a little bit about
my most recent experience with it
as well as like I said,
when to think about changing meds
and how to go about doing it.
So as some of you know,
I was hospitalized back in October
and during this hospitalization
I was started on a new anti-psychotic
and mood stabilizer medication
that I took up until very recently.
But unfortunately,
it began to give me some really nasty side effects.
I began to have these compulsory facial tremors.
Basically I was just blinking really compulsively
and like obsessively blinking.
And it was just getting
to the point where it was way too much to handle.
I couldn't drive anymore because I was blinking too much.
And it was just getting in the way of my everyday life.
So I was prescribed this medication primarily
for the negative symptoms that I had been experiencing
right after my hospitalization or during my hospitalization.
And it was really, really effective in treating that.
So it was kind of hard to determine when the point
of the side effects being too much to handle
in relation to the benefits that it was giving me was at.
But it got really, really debilitating
and so I made the decision
that the side effects were now outweighing the benefits
of the medications.
So I went to my psychiatrist
and I told him what was happening,
and,
he worked with me to find
or to get off that medication
and to find a different medication.
Now, unfortunately
I probably went off the medication a little bit too quickly.
I followed his guidelines.
However, I think it was still too quick of a taper.
It tapered down to half the dose for a week.
And then nothing after that.
Unfortunately, my negative symptoms came back
really strongly.
As soon as I stopped taking the medications.
I was feeling really down
and really struggling with the negative symptoms.
So I made an emergency phone call to my psychiatrist
to explain what was happening
and to ask if there was any other medications
that I could try.
And he acted really quickly
in terms of thinking about,
what other medication combinations could possibly help me
with my negative symptoms
that I was experiencing really severely at the time.
And he prescribed me a mood stabilizer
and an antidepressant.
And so I started taking those right away
and things got a bit better.
I still wasn't seeing a lot of improvement
by the like the next two weeks or whatever
when I had my followup appointment with him.
So he decided to up the dosage
of both of them.
And that was when it got a little
rocky in terms of the med change
because the next couple of days after the med increase,
I was feeling really like loopy, sedated
and just like kind of feeling drugged, basically.
It was really hard to function
and I was really scared
that these meds were gonna make me feel like that,
permanently.
So I decided to kind of stick it out for a couple of days,
just to see if it subsided at all before I called him again
to let him know what was going on.
And eventually after two or three days,
it did subside and it got a lot better.
So I think that any time you increase medications,
you may have stronger side effects initially
but to kind of like, wait and see
what happens to the side effects after a few days
or after a week or two,
I think is a good idea.
Now I'm sure a lot of you are wondering
what medications I was on
and what medications I was switched to.
But I just wanna remind everyone
that I don't usually talk about medications specifically,
especially the medications that I'm on,
because medications affect everyone so differently.
And a medication that's really helpful for me,
might be really awful for someone else.
Likewise, a medication that works really well
for someone else,
might have been a really awful experience for me.
And so I don't wanna sway anyone's opinion
about any kind of meds or anything
because it's so different for every individual.
So to summarize all of that,
basically, I was on a medication
that was working really well for me for specific symptoms
but then it had really debilitating side effects
that I couldn't really live with anymore.
And so I made the decision to talk with my psychiatrist,
to work to find a different alternative.
Now, one thing that I wish
I would have done differently in this situation,
is to just have more of an open conversation with my doctor,
or with my psychiatrist,
from the get go
about how to manage
and how to address the negative symptoms
that the first med was really addressing really nicely.
Because I should have been more aware
that when I remove that med
those symptoms were likely gonna come back.
So being more proactive in that sense
about how to mitigate really severe symptoms
that that med was addressing.
Okay. So when should your meds be changed?
So basically, whenever there's a problem.
So this problem can be like mine,
where the side effects become really debilitating
and begin to outweigh the benefits
that the medication is providing you,
or it could just be
that the medication is not providing enough relief
for your symptoms.
So if you are still experiencing
more symptoms than you can handle or manage,
then it might be a time to
work with your psychiatrist
to find a different medication
that might be more effective for you.
Now, I just wanna qualify this that,
medications are not always going
to remove all the symptoms
and there are going to be breakthrough symptoms
that still occur sometimes for some people,
some people have no symptoms
when they're on a specific medication,
but a lot of people do still have breakthrough symptoms.
So you kind of need to weigh
whether it's a manageable amount of symptoms
that you're still experiencing,
or whether it's too much
for you to manage.
And so how to actually go about changing your medications,
I think the first and foremost step is to
have open communication with your doctor
or your psychiatrist
about your concerns around the medication
and just around the changing medications process.
I think that that's really important to have
continuous communication with them about that.
Also, something that's really important,
is tapering adequately.
And your psychiatrist is going
to be able to give you more guidance
in terms of how to properly taper,
but you don't wanna just quit a medication cold Turkey
because you're gonna have a lot
of withdrawal symptoms
or side effects that come up
and it's not gonna be very fun.
So tapering,
talking with your doctor,
and then also just understanding
that there is going to be a bit of an adjustment period
between stopping one medication and starting another.
Now, ideally you will...
There'll be some overlap
so that the symptoms don't come about too much.
Unlike what I did, where I stopped medication
and then several days later
or a week later,
I started a new medication.
Ideally, your psychiatrist is probably going to recommend
a bit of an overlaps
to avoid too many breakthrough symptoms
or anything like that,
but there is still going to be an adjustment period
where you were coming off of one medication
and maybe experiencing some withdrawal symptoms
and starting a new medication.
And your body needs time to kind of get used to things
and to,
to recalibrate essentially.
Now, one thing that I found helpful
in terms of medication in general,
not just when you're changing medication
but particularly when you're changing medication,
is to keep a journal
of your symptoms
and what you're experiencing in relation to the medications
so that you have a point of reference to bring
to your doctor or psychiatrist to
kind of give them more concrete information
about what you've been experiencing
in relation to your medication.
And it'll just serve as a reminder
to you because it's kind of hard sometimes to remember
during a doctor's appointment,
how you were feeling each day
and what symptoms you were experiencing and what not.
So having that journal can be really helpful in that regard.
And I also wanna just give a quick reminder again
to not just stop taking your medications on your own.
For one, if you just stop cold Turkey,
again, like I said you're going to have withdrawal symptoms
and probably have symptoms fully right back up again.
And so you really want to
taper if you're gonna go off medications
but most importantly,
you really wanna talk to your psychiatrist
about going off medications
or about switching medications.
It's not something you should just do on your own.
You should be under medical supervision when you do it.
So thanks so much for watching this video.
I hope you found it helpful in some way
or related to it in some way with your own experiences.
Again, if you wanna help support the creation
of future videos like this one,
please make sure to check out our Patreon page.
The link is in the description below.
Thank you so much again for watching
and as always wishing you and your loved ones, good health.
Bye.
(Gentle music)