Meds Experiences Thread!!

i just got back from my appointment with my medication clinic. APPARENTLY, daily nausea and vomiting anywhere from 1 to 4 times a week is enough of a negative side effect that the NP there is taking me off Abilify and just keep me on the 15mg Lexapro. i'm only on 2mg of Abilify, which is so small i don't even have to taper off, but yeah. (it is JUST LIKE ME to not realize the severity of my own symptoms until someone else tells me that they're bad.) if you're having that much nausea and vomiting, talk to your doctor!

i'll report back if i have any withdrawal symptoms. i have been very stable and had a lot more spoons in the last couple months, so hopefully going off the Abilify won't mess me up too bad. i'm also curious to see if i lose any weight-- i gained some weight the first time i went on Lexapro, but not the 30 pounds i gained this time.

 

@hyrax I'm glad they found out what's wrong and I hope that you feel better!

Has anyone had trouble with Welbutrin causing blurred vision? My right eye hurts and can't seem to focus all the way - when I try, I can feel it straining, but nothing happens. I checked online and this could be a side effect of the Welbutrin, so I didn't take it this morning. However, I also have some other unidentified health shit going on (long story short, I'm going to see a neurologist on Friday). Could it be the Welbutrin? I'm not trying to sound paranoid, but this is a really bad time for this to happen, and I don't want it to get any worse. It's been a few hours from when I took the Welbutrin yesterday but the problem still persists.

 

Wellbutrin was terrible for me and those months are mostly a blur of angry misery, so i don't remember much of my secondary symptoms there.

day 1 off Abilify and i have headaches and feel very tired and vague today.

 

still headachey, still having trouble concentrating, now having occasional bouts of intense nausea. i'm hoping the latter is an extinction burst, since i'm going off Abilify in an attempt to reduce nausea, but the fact remains that i spent time dry heaving at work the other day.

 

Dissolvable kids Gravol (Dramamine in the US, not sure what in Europe - dimenhydrinate tablets, up to 30mg) saved my life during medication-induced nausea. Enough to take the edge off but not enough to make me sleep.

 

hmm! that's a really good tip. i've only taken dramamine once and it did precisely nothing for me, but i'll look into trying it again for this nausea.

 

add "throwing up at work" to the list of withdrawal symptoms, jfc.

 

I found the book which had the placebo study thing!

It introduced the topic by showing how the placebo effect affected perception of pain, by having the author go into an experiment where they were shocked several times with a system of lights showing how intense the shocks were. At the end, they got a warning light for a weak shock but were given a strong shock, and perceived it as a weak shock.

The drugs that worked off the placebo effect included a painkiller, which was just described as a 'CCK-antagonist', which preformed much better than standard placebos.

But if someone got the CCK-antagonist and weren't told about it, it had no effect at all.


Another drug mentioned was an anti-anxiety drug-it worked perfectly well so long as patients were aware they were taking it. When it was administered to people coming out of surgery, it only worked if the patients were aware they were taking it.

Spoiler: Name of drug

The anti-anxiety drug's diazepam.

They also showed the placebo effect with morphine. Apparently, if you tell someone you're giving them morphine, you get effects at a lower dose than if you didn't tell them, which they noted could be useful and exploited to reduce dosages of painkillers that have dangerous side-effects.

Also there was another study on Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which had three groups: a group put on a fake waiting list, a group given sham acupuncture (like, even if acupuncture works, these guys would still be getting placebo) and a group given sham acupuncture and consulted about their symptoms.

Waiting List group had no improvement, Sham Acupuncture group got some improvement, and Listened To About Symptoms group had an improvement equal to any of the drugs that got called successes for IBS. Like, fake treatment caused a significant objective improvement.

 

Huh, that's really interesting.

My psychiatrist once told me that the placebo effect does not work equally on all symptoms, but it can be extremely powerful for pain.

 

My body is really good at nocebos so I'm hoping it works well with placebos too

 

God, I think the Welbutrin is causing severe blurry vision. Which sucks, because it was really, really helping me. But I'm gonna have to try going off it for tomorrow (and maybe the day after).

 

@ZeroEsper, I'm so sorry. That majorly sucks. I definitely think it's a good idea to let your doctor know what's happening if you haven't already.

Maybe this is the wrong time for being positive about stuff, but even if Wellbutrin is not the answer, at least you have proof things can be better and antidepressants can help?

 

@ZeroEsper damn. my thoughts are with you. Many hopeful and positive thoughts.

 

@Verily @NatashaBezmena thank you both. I'm goimg to talk to my psychiatrist and see if there's anything else we can try. I'm sure there must be something.

 

in the 9 days i was off Abilify, my mood nosedived so hard that it alarmed my therapist yesterday. she had me call the medication clinic and they put me right back on it... with an added prescription for an anti-nausea thing, the name of which i can't remember right now. but yeah, Abilify apparently has a huge effect on my mood. "It was a dramatic shift when you went on it, and it was a dramatic shift when you went off it," in the words of my therapist.

 

today on weird side effects;
take meds at 9 pm. one hour later, the leg bouncing begins
(aka the slight restless limbs things is still definitely a side effect. weird? but harmless)

 

Two weeks on strattera, and a limited improvement in productivity/focus (the most obvious sign being, I wrote an essay during moderate adhd-induced brainfog and finished it in a reasonable time frame), and no apparent negative side effects. No change in anxiety, but no rise in anxiety either, which is the entire reason I'm avoiding stimulants. Upping the dose to see if it helps more, but tentatively hopeful that this is something that will work.

 

Ok I guess I've been on Trintellix for a month now so I can sorta outline my experience?

I got a productivity surge at the beginning of taking it; about 4-10 days in, which was also the end of my winter break and beginning of the school year. The main depression symptoms I was dealing with were severe executive dysfunction, loss of energy, depressed mood, and loss of interest. All four things have had improvement, though that's not too surprising as they were all pretty intertwined.
I have approximately 2-3x the workload I did last term but I'm managing it much, much better. Generally I feel better and am able to like myself more than last term, I more often think positive things about the day I had and what will happen in the future. It's still something of a struggle to start working (which was my main executive function problem- stopping staring at the computer and doing my work is a constant, agonizing fight unmedicated), but with the meds I'm usually able to overcome the urges to just watch one more video or whatever sooner, and stay working a bit longer than before. I feel like this might partially be habit-forming too, as it's something that feels easier the more I can tell myself that I can do it, but I feel like it's still definitely meds too, as with the more stressfull situation I'm in right now (biiiig jam up of all the homework) i've been struggling a lot more to get my work done- but not quite as much still as I was last term.

So! Yeah it's generally working well for me. It hasn't seemed to affect my anxiety at all, but since I have more energy and more spoons it's not as hard to work with/around my anxiety.

As for side effects, I felt.. not really nausea, but a feeling of constant, slightly uncomfortable fullness and increased gas for the first week or so, starting to taper off after three days. I got a slowly increasing over those three days, but then levelling off, sort of.. twitch? Basically I leg bounce stim now, mostly off of instinct more than any physiological need. It just, sorta becomes an awareness that I feel like doing it or I just start doing it and that's that. It doesn't interrupt my life or come with any increased anxiety or energy weirdness, so I've decided it's probably just a weird body bug

 

So, anyone else ever gotten the screaming hungry horrors with Wellbutrin/Bupropion? If so, does it go away? I am apparently Side-Effects Georg, since I switched from Zoloft to the Wellbutren and suddenly started losing like 3 pounds a week. Turns out I was averaging under 1400 calories a day and still slowly gaining weight on the Zoloft, which was supposed less common than with most similar meds, and for most people Wellbutrin is an appetite suppressant. I mean, I don't object to losing weight, though having to wear a belt to keep my pants from falling off is annoying since I can't afford to replace them all. I just hate having to find things I can munch on all day that don't get in the way of my job.

 

I was put on I think 10 mg lexipro which basically didn't help at all. So I asked to up my dosage so Doc puts me on max dosage and it helped, a little? But one time it was time to take it and I was feeling suicidal and was home alone (even though I had 4 roommates at the time) so I took two pills and started hallucinating that the carpet was alive and just sat on the stairs staring at it for ??? A While until the bf came home and put me to bed.

I had to stop cold turkey because of the 5 people who lived there, only me and the bf were employed and the rest of the house was draining our money so much we couldn't afford anything but rent and food. Stopping only was bad because I went from "some help" to "no help"