Posted by CEK on June 13, 2006, at 8:53:21
In reply to Re: Can mood stabiliser lessen akathisia side effe » med_empowered, posted by fuchsia on June 13, 2006, at 1:55:29
Fuchia, I'm not trying to shoot down any of your thoughts on beating the akathisia side effect, but I just wanted to tell you of my experience. A couple of years ago when I was on Effexor and eventually was up to 150mg, my GP started to ween me off of it because of memory loss, feeling like a zombie and bad weight gain over 2 months.(I gained 40lbs in 2 months on this dose.) She added Buspar to help take the edge off of the withdrawl. It helped. A year or so later when my anxiety was getting bad, she gave me some more Buspar, this time it made my anxiety worse. I don't know why it changed for me. It may help you. Someone had posted on here before about a medicine that helped counter effect the akathisia side effect that some people experience with certain meds, but I don't remeber what the med was. Try searching the arcives by typing in akathisia and see if that helps. Med Empowered knows his stuff and I trust what he says. I'm going to talk to my pdoc on Monday about adding Provigil to my Lamictal and see if he'll let me do it to help this treatment resistant depression. I've read up on Provigil after reading his post and according to what I read, it's suppose to be one of the better stimulants. It's suppose to last 12-15 hours. But they say that some doctors won't prescribe it for anything other than certain sleep disorders. If he doesn't want to let me try it I'm going to ask for one of the other stimulants. Good luck trying to find something to make it stop. It's absolutely horrible! I had it with the Prozac, Zoloft and Seroquel and Abilify and I thought I would lose my mind if it didn't stop. It would take me forever to go to sleep at night because instead of restless legs, I would get restless arms and could not be still. I would have to rock and shake my arms around all the time. I felt like there was a demon inside me fighting to come out or something. I just wanted to climb the walls! I feel for you and hope you find relief soon. If it gets too bad, I would call your doctor and see what he says to do. That's what I ended up doing after I went to the emergency room because of it. I was getting 3 hours sleep a night and felt like I was losing it. The ER gave me a muscle relaxer and an Ambien and sent me home and told me to call my pdoc in the morning. The meds the pdoc gave me didn't help at all and I still couldn't sleep. When I called my pdoc the next day, he stopped the Zoloft all together. He had already lowered my dose and that didn't help the akathisia. Maybe you need to try a different med. Good luck. Hope you feel better soon. Love, CEK
poster:CEK
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