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Sensitivities to meds?

I have had troubling side effects from several medications, and even on very low doses. I currently take Lexapro and clonazepam
for depression and anxiety, both at below "therapeutic doses". Still, they are proving to be effective for me.
 
I have a distaste for Zoloft as well. Over the counter medicines are my preferred alternative. GABA and L-Theanine are great for relaxation; L-Tyrosine great for focus; and 5HTP great for improving mood.

A nice joint once in a while also helps.
 
LittleLemon how severe are your mood swings? Specifically do you experience mild or severe depression and do you experience mania or hypo-mania? I was also misdiagnosed initially as depression. This is common most people don't seek help in the up state; so the first psychiatrist you see will likely see you because you are depressed. Have you ever discussed mood stabilizers? (For me) Anxiety is highest when my mood is not level. I've tried clonipin and valume for anxiety (they call these band-aid drugs). They work ok. I think I'm hypersensitive at first but quickly gain a tolerance and become not sensitive to them at all. If you can root out the problem at its source you will have less need for these band aids. Right now I'm on the mood stabilizers Lamictal and Lithium. I feel no instant effect from these drugs. It's similar to taking a vitamin. But ever since I've been on them the mood swings have been few and far between.
 
Mia said:
Each time I see a new drug on the market for something, I think back to my university chemistry classes. We would be given a series of chemical procedures to follow, to make something in the labs that would give a correct result. If you didn't achieve the required result, you had to do more hours of lab work to get it right.

So, naive and honest me, spent sometimes ten hours or more outside of lab time per week to get the correct formulation in the process. When my lab partner asked me what I was doing, and I told her that I 'had' to emulate the experiment correctly to achieve the desired results, she laughed; 'Just copy the numbers from this.' Which as far as I knew is what most people in a lab of forty students had done.

And people wonder why the 'scientific process' is so problematic, when drug formulations present with many side effects. If students are 'cheating' and not learning the proper procedure at the beginning, how else could it be?
Click to expand...

Can confirm. In year 2 of graduate school in pharmaceutical chemistry I was making experimental chemo-therapies. My research adviser put a biochem grad student in charge of cell screening (seeing if different compounds had any effect on cancer cells). Turns out after about 8 months of work on my end someone in her lab found that she had been forging all the cell screening data. Just copied and pasted data from someone else's work. Rendering mine and others biochem data worthless. But people in the lab did catch on and call her out on it...so there's that.
 
I have had appalling luck with medication over the years, and avoid most of it like the plague. If there is a side effect, I will almost certainly develop it. (I'm not talking about imagined nausea or headaches here - I mean tongue swelling up, skin rashes that look like German measles and once, I even got something called 'Ocular gyric crisis', and I don't want that again!) Luckily, I have enjoyed good health for most of my life... The only thing I haven't been able to avoid are antibiotics and am now down to very limited options due to all the adverse reactions over the years. I did read something years ago, when I first suspected Aspergers, about a susceptibility to adverse reactions from drugs, but I'm damned if I can find it now...
 
cory said:
LittleLemon how severe are your mood swings? Specifically do you experience mild or severe depression and do you experience mania or hypo-mania? I was also misdiagnosed initially as depression. This is common most people don't seek help in the up state; so the first psychiatrist you see will likely see you because you are depressed. Have you ever discussed mood stabilizers? (For me) Anxiety is highest when my mood is not level. I've tried clonipin and valume for anxiety (they call these band-aid drugs). They work ok. I think I'm hypersensitive at first but quickly gain a tolerance and become not sensitive to them at all. If you can root out the problem at its source you will have less need for these band aids. Right now I'm on the mood stabilizers Lamictal and Lithium. I feel no instant effect from these drugs. It's similar to taking a vitamin. But ever since I've been on them the mood swings have been few and far between.
Click to expand...
im also misdiagnosed with severe major depressive disorder, i strongly believe im bipolar-it runs in my family to, i have very strong manic states and very strong depressive states, i react badly to SSRIs, i heard this is a common thing with bipolar.

ive mentioned it to staff before but they say 'your just reading up to much on wikipedia',it really annoys me ive spent the past 4 years trying to get assessed for it.
 
I was on and off useless, debilitating medications for seven years and kept trying to kill myself, then I gave up on meds and abused other drugs for about three years and that ended very badly, and then my friends convinced me to try meds again, and they work much better!

Lithium reduces anxiety, weird thoughts, and extreme sensitivity; the lowest dose of wellbutrin completely gets rid of the daily bouts of depression; and Adderall helps me get out out of and reduces social anxiety enough for me to almost "normal" a lot of the time!

I had felt like I had tried every drug there was, but you never know when the next one will work better than all the painful, disturbing crap before it!
 
I really dislike having to use drugs, but lately I have had to start several medications that have drastically improved my life. So one never knows when the perfect treatment is available, unless they try, right? I never used recreational drugs, and certainly don't judge anyone who has, because life can be painful sometimes and people do what they can to try and survive.
 
Yes. Anytime i have ever been put on any drug (except percs after wisdom extraction) things have always gotten worse and even acquired some potentially lifelong disabilities because of them.

SSRI's ... Became robot like devoid of emotions but would cut and have suicidal thoughts. Occasionally A few days of despair. When i quit the drug hey look at that suicidal thoughts and cutting stopped. But the emotional numbness remained. These drugs also make people more compliant. Which, i guess is why psychiatrists always want to prescribe these first so you will be more receptive to whatever poisons they want to push in the future.

Non Selective beta blocker. Has done absolutely nothing for anxiety but has seemed to stop panic attacks. So how does it do this? It basically shuts off your sympathetic system when activated! Complete madness. Your heart rate goes up? Drug kicks in and it brings it back down. BP goes up? it lowers it.
You want to work out and when you work out you NEED the increase in blood pressure and heart-rate to supply your organs and muscles with oxygen rich blood? Well... that's not happening. There are many terrible things with this drug but i'm kind of stuck on them now because of physical dependency.

Anti-Psychotic that was prescribed off label by a psychiatrist just because it had sedative effects. Oh you have trouble sleeping? Take these. And now screwed for life with circadian rhythm disorder.

Magnesium citrate on the other hand has been helpful in combating unnecessary tension in the body and migraines. As for anxiety you have to identify the cause and change it. If you live in a bad neighborhood and that makes you anxious, move. If you're around people that make you anxious hang with a new crowd get someone you can trust. And so on
 
Before I was diagnosed with Asperger's I was put on so many different psychiatric meds I can't remember them all, at least two or three of them are no longer being used because they had dangerous side effects, and I had side effects from the ones that weren't that were just horribly debilitating and didn't get better with time. Because of this I have a profound hatred and distrust for psychiatrists and psychiatric medicine in general. I hate them for not realizing much sooner that I have Asperger's, for treating me a like a human test subject, and for blaming me and my parents for my not responding well to their "treatment". I guess I'm doing okay with the meds I take now, but I'm always worried they'll be changed or their dose increased - again. But I'm not seeing a psychiatrist at the moment because there seem to be none where I live now, they left for the States where the real money is. Figures.:mad: I have go to my regular doctor when my refills at the drug store run out.
 
I took Buspar for a while for anxiety - you're supposed to start on (if I recall correctly) 7.5mg 2x a day and titrate up to up to 16mg 2x a day. I had to titrate DOWN due to side effects, until I was on 2.5mg 2x a day. (The side effect was randomly occurring dizziness - sometimes weeks after the last episode, so I never knew when one was coming. Obviously I can't have that when I'm trying to drive and work.) I couldn't taper off of it because I was on the lowest available dose and the pills couldn't be split - I got angry one night after getting dizzy out of the blue at work again, and I quit them cold turkey.

When I first started the Buspar, I can only describe the experience as "I just spent 15 minutes straight on a tilt-a-whirl, then stepped into a sauna". I couldn't even get off the couch, and I don't know if I could have called for help. Fortunately that was only for the first 15 minutes - half hour after taking it, and only for the first few days.

They DID work though. I just couldn't deal with the dizziness. My doctor offered me Ativan but I declined, because I didn't want to get hooked on it.

That's the only pharmaceutical psych medication I've been on. "Just deal with the side effects, they'll go away" isn't something I'm comfortable with, as I don't have time to spend days or weeks trying to get past the side effects in order to see if something is going to work or not. I have a job to do, and that requires driving and operating machinery. I can NOT be getting dizzy and some such, and I don't want to use all my PTO time playing medication roulette.

I've tried various supplements over the years. 5HTP at the recommendation of a natural pharmacist that I worked for at one time. It DID work, and didn't have many (if any) side effects, but for some reason, I decided not to use it again. I think I felt it was too risky, to come just short of ingesting serotonin. (If I were going to supplement with tryptophan again, I'd use L-tryptophan and no more than what you would typically get from food.)

Magnesium seems to help some - it's not drastic, but it definitely helps even me out. CBD really cuts down on my sensory sensitivities and keeps me from having meltdowns - I have very few meltdowns now.

I've just started on L-Theanine (after seeing someone mention it in a recent thread here - thanks whoever you were!) and so far it's making a huge difference. The first time I took it, I could actually feel it taking effect (the same thing happened with the 5HTP). Everything I can find about it suggests that there are almost no reported side effects, so I feel relatively safe taking it.

My mom had massive problems with bad side effects or flat out paradoxical reactions to drugs. There were almost no antibiotics that she could take. Most recently, she was on gabapentin for nerve pain and it threw her into tetany for hours. Doctors never seemed to believe her, either. At least, many didn't. She was never diagnosed but she's just like me so I strongly suspect she was neurodivergent as well.
 
The last lot of meds I tried were for anxiety.
I stopped after two weeks.
The new and varied symptoms/side effects they created were intense and worrying.
GP dismissed my concerns.
I dismissed her help.
Took matters into my own hands.
To date, I'm happy enough doing it my way.
 
I had ketamine about a decade ago and thankfully I don't need any more operations and I had the most hellish nightmares and hallucinations I think it's possible to have
 
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