Posted by med_empowered on December 22, 2005, at 1:44:14
In reply to Re: Angry Re: Bi-Polar Meds Causing Adult Obesity, posted by corafree on December 21, 2005, at 17:06:35
hey! Yeah, the new meds are "atypical"..its supposed to be b/c they work differently than the old drugs, but all the "atypicals" work differently from each other, so it seems to be more like any drug developed at or after the time of Risperdal is "atypical".
Overweight psychiatrists don't seem all that common. I've had young one, though; I bet if you I had older ones, I'd see more overweight ones. (I've had the misfortune of mostly having self-important youngsters, rather than more experienced shrinks).
The only studies I know of with death rates and atypicals have been on schizophrenics, looking at the overall death rates. Schizophrenics tend to die pretty young, anyway--suicide, drug reactions (lots of "unexplained" deaths that are largely due to neuroleptics), and the ill-effects of poverty. Anyway, I vaguely remember a study done in Ireland where they found that the deathrate jumped up a lot after they started using atypicals. When you keep in mind that lots of patients in Europe still take the old meds (meaning only **some** schizophrenics would be treated with new stuff), it looks kind of scary: people aren't getting TD anymore, but they're dying from weird drug-induced metabolic (sometimes cardiovascular) problems.
I think a lot of times you can prevent problems by being really upfront and kind of b*tchy during your first couple sessions. Ex: I've told shrinks early on: no neuroleptics, no depakote, no lithium. They tried to coax and cajole, but I stood firm. I think although they seemed miffed at first, they respected me more than those patients who just take whatever gets handed out (which is sad, since we're taught to be "good patients" and trust the doc...turns out, being a "good patient" might be dangerous to your health).
Also..have you noticed that, for some reason, no one knows **why** these drugs cause so many problems? I mean, they find $$$ to develop these drugs, market these drugs, and do studies on these drugs for other reasons--seroquel for social phobia, Abilify for OCD, so on and so forth--but for some reason, Big Pharma can't (more likely WON'T) find the $$$ to find out why their "wonder drugs" are making people overweight and sick.
As for your significant other...I don't know what to tell you. You can't help losing attraction to someone who puts on a lot of weight, regardless of the reason. Amantidine and/or Metformin can help stop further weight gain or perhaps allow him to lose the weight. Switching to Abilify or a weight-neutral mood-stabilizer like Trileptal could also prove helpful.
I really don't think spraying around antipsychotics on people who aren't psychotic is such a great idea. It just seems like patients could do pretty well with mood-stabilizers, perhaps with **brief** use of antipsychotics (like, during psychotic mania or psychotic depression). Until recently, that was the goal: minimize long-term use of antipsychotics in bipolar. Now that there's money to be made, antipsychotics are being used for **everything**. Its unfortunate.
poster:med_empowered
thread:590994
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051221/msgs/591199.html