I started taking Abilify (aripripazole) to treat what the psychiatrist considers a moderate-severe delusional disorder. I was on them as a teen but given a much stronger dose this time; x4 15mg tablets a day, two in the morning and two in the evening.
When I took them again for the first time last week, I felt the “calming” effrct that I got when taking another type of drug, benzos, Xanax (alprazolam) but this was overpowered by excessive fatigue which forced me to take naps 3 days straight after. Had to take some caffeine tablets to try and balance the drowsy symptoms.
I wonder what effect these drugs have on the body. Do they behave in the same way as a benzodiazepanes? I heard otherwise from my pharmacist but he said that the new one my physician prescribed me Seroquel (quetiapine) behaves very similar to a benzo because of the significantly shorter half life compared to Abilify.
Antipsychotic drugs are tranquilizers. The original name for the first generation of antipsychotics was “major tranquilizers.” That’s how they suppress the positive symptoms of psychosis and schizophrenia.
Antipsychotics affect dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine (how much depends on the drug). Benzos affect GABA. The resulting behavioral effects may be similar, but the pharmacology is very different.
FWIW, “first-generation antipsychotics” [Wiki] are now (more timelessly) known as “typical antipsychotics,” although as generations come and go, the precedent ones become more … typical.
FWIW, “first-generation antipsychotics” [Wiki] are now (more timelessly) known as “typical antipsychotics,” although as generations come and go, the precedent ones become more … typical.
Also, “tranquility” is not synonymous with torpor.
The pharmaceutical industry (and the psychiatric establishment to whom they peddle their wares so zealously) would have you believe that psychiatric medications are very narrowly tailored to very precise diagnoses of clearly defined ailments. That ain’t so.
Craziness exists. And it isn’t random noise, there are observable patterns. But “mental illness”, in the classic sense of “this is a medical issue, some specific biological function is misbehaving here and that is the cause of human craziness”, is still a mostly unsupported theory (there’s more evidence that all such symptoms are a consequence of events and circumstances than there is that such symptoms are caused by the person’s biological condition; the most likely theory is that it is a combination of the two, with the biological portion being a greater or lesser tendency to react to stressors and events in this fashion).
Pills that have proven helpful to people, those also exist. But far from being exact remedies for exact biological conditions (the way that insulin is a specific agonist that addresses diabetes which is specifically an insulin deficiency disease), antipsychotics are blunt tools that interfere with neuron synapsing in broad-spectrum ways, affecting motor neurons and sensory neurons along with the ones that are concerned with emotional and cognitive functions. There is no “chemical imbalance” that is being balanced by these medications. There’s just symptom relief. That’s nontrivial for the people for whom they work well (some people here on this board attribute their very lives to psych meds) but they don’t work equally well for everyone.
And yes: News flash!! Doctors and pharmaceutical companies make claims for knowledge and effectiveness beyond what they can deliver!! — it’s not like it only happens with regards to psychiatric medicine. But psychiatric medicine is an area of practice particularly rife with it, for various social and historical reasons.