betteroffdying:Creativity gone

[betteroffdying]

Hello, i take Xeplion/Paliperidone since 8 months ago.

I get an 100mg injection each month, my last injection has been almost one month ago but i don't feel any better yet, i know it's a long term antipsychotic and stays 3-6 months in your system.

After those injections i literally feel like a zombie, my creativity is gone, and i feel emotionally numb.

My question is, do any of you have any stories of stopping antipsychotics or SSRIs about how it affected your creativity/imagination while taking them? Did your brain completely go back to normal like how it was before after some time of stopping them?

I'd appreciate any stories and it would help me out a lot.

Much thanks.

[Altostrata]

Welcome, betteroff.

 

I moved your post here to start your Introductions topic, where you can ask questions and track your progress.

 

Yes, dulling your brain and thinking is the way an antipsychotic "works." As long as you get these injections, you will have this side effect.

 

Have you reported this adverse effect? Can you request a lower-dose injection? This will help you taper off the drug.

 

We do have a number of people who have let the injections wear off or otherwise tapered an antipsychotic and recovered from the numbness -- but this is very slow and gradual.

 

Here are Tips for tapering off Invega (paliperidone)

 

Please use search in the Introductions forum for people who are tapering injections or antipsychotics such as paliperidone, aripiprazole, olanzapine, etc.

[betteroffdying]

• Hello, thanks for the reply.
• I can't simply stop taking those antipsychotics because the court ordered me to, if i would stop attending those injections they would put me into a mental ward.
• I don't have any illnesses like schizophrenia, it's really bad when you are forced to take drugs and don't have a condition.
• I wrote a letter to the court a few days ago about changing my social worker, it might take up to a month until i get an answer. 
• I hope the new social worker would be ok with me not takings those medications.
• How long does it usually take for the brain to go back to "normal", like it was before, if at all?
• I talked to someone already on antidepressants and they said it took them a year.

[Sassenach]

Hi Betteroff

 

46 minutes ago, betteroffdying said:

How long does it usually take for the brain to go back to "normal", like it was before, if at all?

 

46 minutes ago, betteroffdying said:

I talked to someone already on antidepressants and they said it took them a year.

This is a question noone can answer, we are all different.

Also depends on how long you have been on meds.

How old are you?

There is little we can do to help while the court is in charge of your meds.

 

Sassenach

[Altostrata]

Requesting a lower dosage injection might be a way to segue into going off altogether.

[betteroffdying]

1 hour ago, Sassenach said:

 

Also depends on how long you have been on meds.

How old are you?

I am 21 years old and have been on Paliperidone 8 months now.

[PoetJester]

Hi betteroffdying

 

I was forced onto risperidone for six months by the court and my creativity and thinking came back after i quit the drug.  I had spent three months in a psych ward getting progressively worse.  By two months, i was unable to speak or form sentences and had lost all my physical reflexes.  I was unable to hit a ping-pong ball with a paddle.  It felt like i had to lift an elephant with my head every time i would try to talk.    There was only one phrase i was able to say and i kept repeated it over and over to the doctor who ignored me.  It was "I don't like how i feel."    I kept repeating this phrase over and over, but no one would listen.   My voice when i would speak the phrase,  sounded like that of a five year old child, since i had brain damage.   

 

Eventually i was transfered to nursing home for elderly people with senility and i was young, like you are now, only 23.   A year earlier, i had been working jobs and going to bars and now i was in a home with people who wet their beds or talked gibberish.  the staff in the nursing home tried to get me to do art projects that a small child would do, like making pictures of turkeys by tracing an outline of my hand (i had been in art classes at college only a few years earlier) and also tried to get me to play games meant for very small children- bowling with hollow plastic pins and balls.    It was hell. 

 

I finally asked for ECT one day as my six month court order was coming to an end.  I went up to the administrator of the group home i was put in after the nursing home,  and said "I want ECT" .  The three word sentence was about all i was capable of speaking.   I went in for the ECT treatment and the doctors stopped forcing me to take the risperidone at the same time.  Within two days, i regained the ability to speak and form sentences as the drug left my system.   I later went back to work as a dishwasher in a restaurant.   There are some other stories on here of people who were given injections and got better, it seems to be about a year, before the emotional numbness goes away.   Dont' give up hope.  

 

poetjester (Derek)

[betteroffdying]

Thanks for the reply, Derek, gave me a lot of hope.

And going to a nursing home at 23 sounds harsh, what in the world was the court/doctors thinking.

[PoetJester]

They weren't thinking.  You just end up getting lost in the shuffle over here, they delegate authority and pass people on down the line to less and less competent care and when you arrive at new places, the staff doesn't know much about you, except that you are mostly incapable of speaking and pace in circles all day, so no one knows what you were like before the drugs caused brain damage, but they should have known, at least at the psychiatric ward and probably the other places, but no one cared. 

 

The first week or two in the psychiatric ward, i was talking with the nursing staff there, joking around and reading the newspaper's sport's section,  and even made a pretty nice hand-tooled leather coin purse for my sister in Occupational Therapy, but within a month or so, i was just pacing in circles all day and unable to speak from the brain damage.  The sad thing is my parents knew about everything that was going on at the time, too.  I don't know if you have ever seen the movie, Weekend at Bernies, where two friends have to take their dead boss' body around places and pretend that he's living, but my six months being instituitionalized was sort of similar in a way. 

 

My parents took me to Thanksgiving dinner at my Grandmother's house one day during the time i had been staying at the nursing home.   My uncles came up to me when we had got to my Grandmother's house and started making small talk and joking around with me, like they usually did, since i don't see them that often, and then noticed that i couldn't speak and that the areas around my eyes were shiny and darkened (from the brain damage.  I looked like Jack Nicholson's character at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and walked away with very concerned looks on their faces.  Then i was expected to eat dinner with brain damage.   I was only capable of eating about 2-3 bites of food at every meal and was also chemically castrated besides, so it wasn't a great meal for me.  I just sat there trying to not let my head fall into my plate of food for twenty minutes while fidgenting in my seat while my grandmother talked to me at the table and then got up after only eating a few bites of food and went outside to smoke in 0 F temperatures.  

 

Once, i even escaped the psychiatric ward when a nurse left a locked door open on a stairwell, as he left work for the evening.  I had akithesia besides the brain damage, so all i did for most of the day was pace back and forth down the hallway and wish for death every second of every day, due to the akithesia.  I walked down the stairwell and left the hospital with only a windbreaker on, on a bitter cold October day.  I had nowhere to go, so i walked around downtown Minneapolis for two hours shivering in the cold and finally called my father to pick me up.  I wasn't able to say much on the phone, but my father came and got me anyways while i waited under one of the bridges that go over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. 

 

We drove to a White Castle hamburger fast food restaurant and went through the drive through window and got some food and my father made a joke about how White Castle hamburgers were called "sliders" because they were so greasy they slid right through you, but when i laughed at his joke, my voice sounded totally stifled and strange because of how my brains were hampered by the drugs, and my father looked at me with a terrified look and then drove me back to the hospital.   My parents really couldn't do anything about what was going on, since it was the State's order to have me committed (i had only been homeless and found on a park bench malnourished one day by two police officers and taken to the psych ward.  I hadn't really committed any crime except maybe dropping out of college. lol) but they even denied knowing about how badly i was doing at the time when i asked them later after my commitment had ended and the pills were stopped being given to me.

 

My mother still has a picture in her family photo album of Christmas 1995 where my eyes looked totally glassy and glazed over and the expression on my face is similar to what you see of pictures of old Wild Wild West outlaws who have been gunned down and propped up in chairs for publicity photos.   It was horrible. 

 

Even at the group home, which is where i was when i went in for the four or five sessions of ECT, they didn't really care.  After i got back to the home and was a fully functioning human being again, i was outgoing and laughing and talkative and went up to one of the staff members there (it was an older lady who worked in the pill dispensary.  She used to say "come get your medicine" every day in the group home at medication time, even while the "medicine" was causing me the brain damage and making my life a living hell) and  said to her "look, i'm myself again.  I can talk again."  (i was not able to speak consecutive sentences together while on risperdone, and only spoke maybe a handful of stunted sentences in my six months on the drugs.  In fact, i hadn't even spoken a word to the pill dispensary woman in three months in the group home) and she got angry at me and snapped at me saying  "it can always come back."    She hadn't really cared about me before, and probably didn't even know my name, but now was angry when i was off of the pills and feeling better and not brain damaged.