#medicalmalpractice

Why thank you.

Cuddy just says I’m “mentally ill.”

Cameron thinks I’m misundertsood

and Wilson thinks I’m Autistic.

R owned by @jamieenthusiast

A silly cartoon about a serious problem.

Risperidone is an antipsychotic medication designed to treat schizophrenia in adults and children. Like most antipsychotics now a days, its also being used to treat a rainbow of other, unrelated mental illnesses including depression and anxiety. Although I have yet to find a report where this drug was used successfully to treat the latter conditions, its use and over use in psychiatry continues to haunt me because of my personal experience with this drug.

In theory, Risperidone works by blocking dopamine and serotonin receptors. These two receptors are associated in psychiatry with a person’s ability to feel good. When they are blocked – the reward system is suppressed and people are rendered flat and lifeless. Why then, I continue to ask myself, are they being prescribed to people with depression and anxiety if their very mode of operation is to suppress your brain’s ability to feel good?

The reason is because drugs like these are never accurately measured. Anecdotal reports of what these drugs do are taken as proof that they will work on a large group of people if one patient reports a positive effect from the drug. How these medications really work remains hypothetical, but it was enough for my psychiatrist at the time to force me to take this medication for months and months and months by involuntary injection after I complained of life threatening side effects.

I do not believe that all patients taking this drug cannot benefit from it – antipsychotics are extremely effective in treating patients with psychosis. However, depression and anxiety are not psychosis. So why are these drugs being lauded for curing things beyond psychosis? I don’t know. But I have some theories.

I will get it out of the way that I don’t believe doctors in Canada are financially rewarded for administering certain drugs. I know the system doesn’t work that way, for the most part. But what does work is marketing from drug companies. Marketing that is so effective based on the principal that the developers of this drug are proposing it be used because they believe it works to cure a variety of psychiatric ailments based on a few studies. They then market this belief to psychiatry, and it’s a win-win situation. The drug company profits and psychiatrist treat people with a drug they feel confident works. Its both economically and ethically sound if both parties are honest in their claims about the drug. However, I have not yet found any quantitative scholarly articles supporting the claim that Risperidone treats things outside of psychosis. However, its absolutely deadening effects that render a patient lifeless are likely misinterpreted as an improvement for a variety of mental illnesses.

Risperidone doesn’t treat anxiety or reduce depression. It reduces your drive to do anything at all – rendering you almost comatose. Many people have referred to the antipsychotic as being something that is used to chemically lobotomize people. I agree.

I know it didn’t work for me. It caused unbearable mental impairment, depression, anxiety, terror, absolute misery. I recognized that it was caused by Risperidone, but my claims were dismissed. Repeatedly. I was forced to take this medication and live in a state of dread and dysphoria for 6 months. I’d supplement myself with hard drugs just to get a break from the overwhelming depression caused by Risperidone. Just so I could do the things I used to do – like enjoy a TV program. Despite making desperate pleas to get off for months and months, I was forced under threat of incarceration to take Risperidone. In order to ensure I didn’t skip doses, I was injected with a long lasting dose. I was stuck in a mental hell for the duration of that dose. Usually two weeks. If I refused to get my next dose: psych ward, isolation room, and an increase in the amount of Resperidone I’d have to take.

I can’t understand why this happened. Did the psychiatrist just not want to be wrong? If I’m complaining about severe side effects – why didn’t he attribute them to Risperidone which they should have been attributed to? The side effects I had were known side effects of this drug. But still, my psychiatrist and his colleagues at Psychiatric Emergency Services in Victoria BC insisted that my claims were premature, and that the drug took time to work. How on earth would you know it takes time to work? You let people get tortured for months and months and expect a change? The method in which this drug works is simple – it blocks dopamine and serotonin. It makes you listless and docile because you don’t have any motivation. It doesn’t cure anxiety or depression, it suppresses your reaction to it.

I did end up getting off Risperidone after an painful cold-turkey withdrawal. The withdrawal lasted weeks. I experienced restricted breathing, shaking, insomnia, anxiety and unrelenting depression. However, its lingering effects of promoting anxiety and depression wore on since my dopamine and serotonin receptors had to revive themselves. This anxiety was treated with, yet again, an antipsychotic. Luckily it was the lesser of the evils, Abilify.

Antipsychotics, unlike dopaminergic drugs, are not mentally addicting. There is no urge to re-use and there is no desire to use excessively because it blocks the brain’s reward system instead of flooding it like addicting drugs like amphetamines and opiates. But just because they aren’t habit forming doesn’t mean they’re good. Drinking bleach is horrible, deadly and non-habit forming but that doesn’t mean its good to ingest.