How I got off Haldol and Abilify

[[Ga...]]

Heya.

 

In the past thirty years I've been on every antipsychotic that exists, or damn near. When my doctor told me he didn't think I needed to be on any, I was taking Abilify and Haldol in addition to Temazepam. By that time I had gotten off Lithium and Lamictal and an anticholergenic whose name I can't recall ATM. This is how I got off Abilify and Haldol.

 

Haldol is the most difficult drug I've ever tried to withdraw from, bar none. I've heard it's harder to get off than Heroin, and while I've never shot smack, it wouldn't surprise me. The paradoxical reactions and ancillary effects I had to it included constant, terrifying auditory hallucinations, depersonalization, fatigue, and a lot of other stuff. If you stay on it for more than a couple of years, you're at a significant risk for Tardive Dyskinesia, which I did NOT want, and I'd been on it for almost two years, so the clock was ticking.

 

I had already quit my job and rented a little house in the woods in order to do this—I decided I'd rather be functional than have savings, and my parents helped a lot (and are still helping). My memories of that year are fragmentary, but here's what I did to the best of my recollection.

 

My starting dose was 20mg (!) and I initially went down by 5mg a month until I hit 10 mg. It was brutal. The hallucinations were constant—laughing, taunting voices. Sometimes I'd be drifting off to sleep and I'd hear someone softly call my name, and then giggle. It was like living in a horror movie. I don't know what the precise mechanism of action is, but I think it's that your dopamine levels, which are artificially restricted by the drugs, suddenly spike. I was certainly floridly psychotic, but I wasn't delusional—that is, I knew the hallucinations were hallucinations.

 

At 10mg, I stopped my taper for a month to stabilize. I noticed that I was moving a bit faster than I had previously been able to, physically, and that I was a bit more coordinated.

 

At the end of that month, I started dropping down by 2mg every two weeks. The hallucinations returned. After about a week they'd go away and stay away as long as I was careful not to exert myself—I lay on my couch and read Reddit most of the day, occasionally going outside and sitting in a chair in the yard if I felt up to it, but being anywhere near another person triggered them, so my dad brought my groceries to the door and left them there. I couldn't listen to music, which would immediately trigger a hallucination.

 

When I got down to 5mg the hallucinations got so bad that I went back up to 10 mg. They got a little better, but my mom was so worried about my getting TD that I decided that I was going to just power through it. I got even more aggressive—by that time I had a good handle on the rhythm of antipsychotic withdrawal and I had learned some mental techniques that helped (they're hard to explain, but an analogy that might be useful to someone is of a dislocated shoulder—if moving your arm makes your shoulder pop out of socket, you have to learn how to do everything without using that arm at all—there are just things you can't think), I decided I was going to go down 1 mg every two weeks.

 

(I should mention that my psychiatrist was and is on board with this. I don't know how you do this without a sympathetic doctor, and I know I'm incredibly fortunate to have a crusty old doc who thinks we need to medicate less rather than more.)

 

1 mg every other week meant I was just going to have to deal with twenty weeks of constant hallucinations. I did. It was not a good time. I managed to do some freelance work during that time. I'm not proud of my output, and I managed to alienate a couple of clients—not through my behavior, which I had a surprisingly good handle on, given that I was hearing voices—but because I just couldn't do the work to a sufficiently high standard.

 

After the last 1mg pill, it took about two months for the hallucinations to die down. (They didn't go away completely until after I was off the Abilify.)

 

Getting off the Abilify presented new problems. While I knew how to get off antipsychotics by this time, I was a little more functional, which was both good news and bad news. On the one hand, I could work again, a little. On the other hand, I didn't have a good idea of how fucked-up I still was, and being better in a relative but not absolute sense makes you overconfident.

 

I started at 30 mg, the highest dose they recommend. My first taper lasted a month and got me down to 25 mg. The hallucinations got better, but I got really paranoid, which continued until after I was off the drug entirely. The second taper, also a month, got me down to 20 mg. At that point I went to 2 mg every two weeks until I got down to 10 mg. I sweated a lot—I remember changing my clothes twice or three times a day. I was able to learn to drive again, which I hadn't done in a decade. I started dating, which was okay—I met some nice people, all of whom were in places of intense transition themselves. My doctor suggested that I ease up my taper, and I started going down by 1 mg every three weeks.

 

At 6 mg things got hard again. The hallucinations came back. The pain in my legs, which came and went, came and stayed, and the paranoia and restlessness were unbearable. I had planned to keep tapering down on schedule, but instead I cancelled all my work commitments, bought a month's worth of groceries, locked myself in my house for three weeks and did a relentless, 2 mg/week taper until I was off the Abilify entirely.

 

I called my psychiatrist afterward and apologized for misleading him regarding my schedule, which I'd never done before. He said "The plan was to get you off this stuff. You got off this stuff. It's okay."

 

I gave myself three months to get as much of the drug out of my system as possible and started tapering off the Restoril in June. 

 

If anyone has any questions, I'll try to answer them. 

[[Me...]]

That because your brain releases Dopamin if you listen to music, also social interaction or conversation releases Dopamin. It annoys me.

 

Did you get hallicunation when did sport, masturbation/sex, Gaming? Because all these actions also release Dopamin?