Posted by bleauberry on July 3, 2008, at 20:51:28
In reply to Coming off Zyprexa..., posted by jms600 on July 3, 2008, at 18:02:09
I came off zypexa after being on it 8 years. So yeah, it can be done. There are a few tricks that make it smoother. Anyone who tries to come off any AP too fast is asking for mental and physical torture.
1. Go very slow. It took me 2 months to get from 5mg to 0mg.
2. Reduce dose in tiny increments. How? With a pill splitter, cut the pill in half. Then with a razor blade or sharp knife cut a tiny corner off one of the halves. Don't consume that tiny corner, just the full half and the almost-full half. The corner you removed might be about .25mg to .50mg, so you reduced your dose by that much. After a few days, remove a bit larger corner. Eventually you will be at the point of just taking half the pill per day and saving the othe half for the next day, at which time you will shave a tiny crumb off of it. Eventually that dose will be just 1/2 of a half pill. And so on. Toward the end you will be taking a tiny crumb each day.
3. If at any time you run into difficulties...nausea, anxiety, insomnia, feeling wired, whatever...stay where you are and don't change dose any more until things settle down. A couple times I even went back to my most recent previous dose and stabilized there, then continued my journey weaning. If you go too fast, your body will let you know.
The doses will never be exactly the same size since it is impossible to shave off the same exact amount each day, but they will be close enough. I think the inaccurate dosing, maybe off by .10mg to .25mg, is actually a good thing. Gets the brain in the mode of adjusting quickly and of not being reliant on a perfectly steady blood level all the time.
Go slow and in tiny increments and things will be as smooth as possible. Go too fast or in too large of dose size changes and you might wish you hadn't. That's my best advice.
Even after being completely off zypexa, following a 2 month slow taper in tiny steps, it was another 2 months before I could tell my body had finally stabilized. These psych drugs, especially APs, are very powerful drugs. Just as it took a while for us to adjust to them getting started, it takes a while to undo that.
poster:bleauberry
thread:837888
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080626/msgs/837913.html