How psych drugs drove my autisitic son crazy (article)

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This article is an example of what kind of damage psychotropic meds can do to autisitics, especially anti psychotics. This is a real interested story and the mom seems to have a real positive view on her autistic son even as Abilify and Geodon caused him to descend into madness and essentially made him worse.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/0 ... source=rss

http://web.syr.edu/~rjkopp/data/as_diag_list.html

What a BEAUTIFUL story!! !! ! It is a shame that doctors generally don't care about their patients!

Steve

Thanks for posting story & link, I read it & also sent it on to another person who might find it interesting. If it hadn't been for this being posted here, I'd never have run across it otherwise.

http://www.truthaboutscientology.com/st ... bauer.html

Saw this on Digg I wonder if the author of the artical is the same person?

http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/ ... index.html

This artical has me thinking it is her own son she is talking about.

yah did you ever see that unsolved mysteries about that dude who was a hfa and they drugged him up threw him in a grouphome and he wan away? i think hes still missing to this day

http://threelayercake.com/content/view/184/50/

Tells about the authors history. It is her son the artical was about it seems.

heres that episode i was talking about

http://www.unsolved.com/0000-GordiePage.html

My mom's younger brother, who I also am sure had AS, had a very similar story to this man as well. he was a very shy, strrange yet functional boy up until about 16 or 17. then he started to have serious problems, becoming more and more withdrawn and difficult. He was in fact dx'd with schizophrenia, locked up and medicated heavily with the drugs they had at the time (this would have been the late 50's/early 60's). When they released him, he was a zombie and completely dysfunctional. He showed up on one of my aunt's doorstep one day. He stayed there for a couple fo days, and then disappeared. he was never neard from again, and the family just assumes he died somehow.

I've experienced something like "autistic catatonia" myself, when I was 23. I say "something like" because I wasn't completely dysfunctional and I didn't seek treatment for it, but it essentially destroyed my life. It was right after I graduated college - years of practicing music and 5 years to get my music degree, and all I could do in lay around in a dark room, occasionally getting up to go to the bathroom or eat something. At the time I had though that I was developing schizophrenia myself, because at times I had episodes of mildly delusional thinking and what I think may have been hallucinations. I just withdrew for the world for a few years. I almost ended up homeless, because I couldn't work.

But unlike schizophrenics, I recovered pretty much from it from rest and slowly intergrating myself back into society. I did go on a 18 month course of SSRIs when it seemed I was relapsing back in into it when I was 28-29. The SSRIs did help with the compulsive thinking (I was compulsively thinking about suicide all the time for about a month. This was the same time I got the nerve up to tell my shrink I thought I had AS (my shrink also reassured me that I was not schizophrenic, thankfully). Even though I had had some psychotic-like episodes in the past, I absolutely refused to go on anything stronger than Zoloft. You see, my brother who I also think has AS, was put on various psych meds, including a couple of atypical antipsychotics (he had been misdx'd as manic depressive), when he was a teen, and the result was horrific. I told my shrink that because my brother, I won't take any antipsychotics whatsoever.

After working in a psych hospital, my opinion of atypicals is more informed and more negative. Geodon's probably the worst, as it not only radically alters a person's personality, it cause a vast number of serious health problems, from obesity, to diabetes, to heart damage. It's like they're killing these people via Geodon, because it's essentially poison, and more importantly: IT DOESN'T WORK. The rest of this class of drugs isn't much better.

Bottomline: atypical antipsychotics are horrible, horrible, horrible. That austistics suffer worse on these drugs is no surprise to me.

When I was in high school I was prescribed Abilify, and I remember I was on it for about a week before I totally refused to take anymore. My doctor told me I needed to give it more time, but I seriously can't even imagine what kind of disorder a person would have to have in order for that s**t to be able to help them. I've tried my share of meds, but Abilify is near the top of my list for crappiest.