aspies more sensitive to psych med side effects?
i have a fairly long history of psych medication use. in my life, i have never been on a medication for more than a month except for one, which i will mention at the end.
i came back to treatment about four months ago and my treatment team has tried to convinced me that in the past i have manifested side effects of medications by reading the possible side effects and worrying them into existence. i want to progress in my treatment and truly am, so i chose to believe them. i did not read potential side effects and have tried some medications that i have no history of trying.
it is not going well. i deal for as long as i can then end up asking for them to be discontinued or changed. sure enough, i experience side effects at even the smallest therapeutic doses. in the past, i remember this occurring with mostly ssris, but these days it proves to be happening with psych medications from many walks of life.
next week i am going to ask for a fairly low dose of a short acting adhd medication along with a fairly low dose of a short acting benzodiazepine. i mention the last one because i was on klonopin for about seven years and bezos seem to have very few side effects other than dependance and dependancy does not usually impact effectiveness for treating insomnia.
my question is, do you find that you experience quite a few side effects when you do decide to take or submit to taking psych meds? maybe it is just my biology and i should consider AS to be a factor, but i wanted to ask.
Once I got my diagnosis, I was so relieved to no longer take anymore meds (I was previously misdiagnosed with OCD, bipolar, anxiety NOS, blah blah, blah) and anything the doctor prescribed me gave me bad side effects. Even non-psychs and OTC meds give me side effects. My doctor (before the AS Dx) told me that I must just be very sensitive to medication (plus he discovered I am a slow metabolizer). I know many other Aspergians who can't tolerate medication either, so I think it is just related to our regular sensory sensitivity.
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"If you can't call someone else an idiot, then you are obviously not very good at what you do."
I tried Celexa as a kid, and just felt "weird" on it. I also may or may not have taken like 45 minutes to cross the street whilst on it. Not sure. I just didn't like the feel.
I got prescribed Ritalin and stopped after like 5 days. It shot my blood pressure and pulse way up. My resting is like 115/65, 70 pulse. On 10mg Ritalin, my pulse always went up to 100 or 95, and my BP to like 135/85-90, on 20, I had a 105 pulse and 140s/90 blood pressure. When 10mg was combined with about any amount of caffeine, 140/90, 100 pulse. But, besides the cardio sides, I have NVLD, so I have a lot of verbal thought process, the Ritalin like, made me dumb. It stopped the "racing thoughts" that are normal for me, and just made me dumb. Made my reaction times way worse and stuff, as instead of accelerating the verbal thoughts like caffeine does, it cut a good deal of them out I guess, so I basically got the medicine to potentially to make driving easier, and it made it worse. So after my experience with Ritalin, which is a fairly "predictable" kinda med, I don't wanna try anymore psych meds except maybe Piracetam. Maybe.