Callista wrote:
anbuend wrote:
They can be dangerous to people with conditions that are more common in autistic people than the average person. I really don't believe in use without informed consent. True informed consent, not what usually passes for it. Except as an anti-emetic, which isn't how they're using them and usually involves far smaller doses. They don't actually "treat autism" anyway.
OK, this interests me--I tend to have medication sensitivity; Zoloft knocked me out and I couldn't lift my head when I was on a normal dose of Tylenol/codeine... let alone what happened with the Haldol, which might as well have been general anesthesia... Which conditions are you referring to? I know we're more likely to be over-sensitive or have paradoxical reactions. Are autistic people more vulnerable to neuroleptic-related movement disorders too?
Yes, since we're more vulnerable to parkinson-like/catatonia-like movement disorders in the first place (whether progressive or just always-existing), we're also more vulnerable to pseudoparkinsonian side-effects. And in the extreme form, those side-effects can be potentially lethal, and even when they're not that, they can do permanent damage to motor-planning skills. Also, if you already have certain movement disorders, it can be almost impossible to differentiate them from signs of neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a very dangerous and frequently lethal side-effect.
Also, they lower the seizure threshold, so autistic people who are also epileptic can have increased seizures on them, which can be dangerous. At one point, I was having very frequent myoclonic and atonic seizures (myoclonic ones caused my arms to fling out randomly and fling objects around if I was carrying them, atonic caused me to drop, extremely rapidly, to the ground, after losing all muscle tone, hitting the ground hard and injuring myself, at the worst point these were happening every few seconds and I could barely get up before I fell down again). Whereas normally I only have complex-partial seizures (and possible absence seizures).
I'm just an example though, these are common reactions to these drugs for people with these particular problems. This isn't just "all drugs have side-effects", this is "people who are more prone to these problems (i.e. autistic people) have an increased risk of very dangerous side-effects, and an increased risk of less dangerous but still quite problematic side-effects, especially the ones that don't go away after you stop taking the drug". This isn't to say that some people don't get good effects from these drugs, but rather that these drugs should be a personal choice of the user, with full information as to what they can do, rather than something forced on people.
Additionally, while the newer ones have a slightly different side-effect profile, they're not free of the same side-effects as the older ones. I couldn't tell the difference between new ones and old ones when I was on them. (And I've been on several of both, as well as being on high-potency, mid-potency, and low-potency versions of the old ones, at several dosage levels.)
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
15 Sep 2010, 1:31 pm
