How to Get Off Anti-Psychotic Medications

Anti-psychotic medications include Seroquel or "quetiapine", Haldol or "haloperidol", Zyprexa or "olanzapine", Geodon or "Ziprasidone", and Risperdal or "Risperidone". These medications are most commonly used to treat schizophrenia and bi polar or manic depression. Getting off these medications is not easy. First, I'll educate you a bit on how anti-psychotic medications work.

Most of these drugs limit the release of dopamine in your body. Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter in your brain. When you limit dopamine with the anti-psychotic drugs they cause an effect of sedation. This decreases the mania, the mood swings, the voices and sometimes the hallucinations. They work very well in calming people down and that's how they are the first choice in treating anyone with schizophrenia or bi polar. For a while, everything seems fine with the patient. Then after a bit of time, the patient has trouble functioning and becomes less and less independent. Then the patient decides to stop taking the medication and all of the sudden, they are more manic than they have ever been, they are having mood swings worse than ever. Here's how this happens.

Over time, your brain has learned to adapt to the medication. In turn, it has developed more dopamine receptors in an attempt to put out the same amount of dopamine as when you weren't on the medications. If you stop the drug cold turkey, the results are likely to be catastrophic. You would have a massive overload of dopamine from tall of those receptors. You see, there would be no drug to limit or hold back the dopamine. So you taper yourself off the medications. Though not as bad as if you went off them cold turkey, you are still going to have a much higher than normal occurrences of mood swings, and manic behaviors.

If you really want to stop using the anti-psychotic medications, here's how you do it.

Get a support group of friends, family, and peers that have gone through this, get professional help from the physician that prescribed the medications. Reduce the medication a small amount and when the slight withdrawal symptoms let off , you reduce it again. This medicine tapering is better done in an in-patient facility like a mental health ward where you can be closely monitored. A facility has ways of treating the withdrawal symptoms by giving you nutritional supplements that will make a big difference on how bad the withdraw is. A drug rehab isn't the answer. You are DEPENDENT on these drugs but you are NOT ADDICTED to them. There is a difference. Drug rehab facilities treat addiction.

So where do you go from here? Make an appointment with your psychiatrist and let him or her know that you want to be taken off the medications. If you're not sure if you should do it. Google "antipsychotics and brain damage". Print it out and bring it with you to your psychiatrist appointment. That will scare you into stopping them. And if your psychiatrist tells you that the information you bring in is false, he or she is telling you a bold faced lie. They ALL know about these studies. Good luck to you.