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descongelate
Butterfly
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23 Jun 2015, 6:28 am

Hi! I was wondering if any of you have taken Ability. I have ASD + ADD and severe bouts of depression. I was starting to have mild paranoid thoughts (friends criticising me without being an actual reason or being followed on the street) My psychiater has prescribed me Abilify. He said that it helps with paranoid thinking and depression. However, I am very concerned about the side effects. I was wondering if anyone has tried it and (hopefully) had a good experience with it.
Thanks a lot in advance for your feedback!



886
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23 Jun 2015, 7:05 am

It's a very powerful anti-psychotic with a track record of helping those with bipolar depression, but the movement disorders are actually a fairly common side effect. If paranoid thinking is taking over your life it's probably worth a shot, though keep in mind, it's a damn powerful drug.


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descongelate
Butterfly
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23 Jun 2015, 7:18 am

Thank you for your reply!

The thing is that the paranoid thoughts are not that bad in my opinion. He said that Ability would help with the paranoia and the depression. But I have read terrible stories on the internet about it. I know everyone reacts to medication in a different way but most people seem to give negative feedback about this one. The movement disorders terrify me because I already have a tremor in my left hand and I am very clumsy in general.

I think I am going to put it on hold and discuss it again with my psychiatrist.



Rose0001
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23 Jun 2015, 9:36 am

I would not recommend taking Abilify. I was on it and had a terrible experience. Abilify caused me to crave food/sweets and therefore gain weight. When I stopped taking Abilify I lost all the weight I gained but my skin lost its elasticity. I then had to appeal to my insurance company to pay for me to have plastic surgery to fix the excess skin that was hanging off of my body. The doctor who prescribed Abilify never told me how serious the side effects were. I never experienced paranoia either. My doctor said the drug could be used to augment my antidepressant.
Abilify is a terrible and powerful drug and it's frightening how many doctors routinely write scripts for this medication without going over all the potential side effects with their patients.



ProfessorJohn
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23 Jun 2015, 11:56 am

You have to take what you read on the internet with a huge grain of salt. Remember, the negative experiences are much more likely to get written about because people are truly upset and want to let everyone else know. Most of the time if you have a positive experience with a product (be it medicine, a car, a dishwasher, whatever) you just continue life enjoying it. The ones that feel damaged or ripped off by it want to vent and let the whole world know.

I have not taken Ability but I am on some other medications that had lots of horror stories on the internet, but those things didn't happen to me. One is Zrytec (the allergy medicine). Google that and see the horror stories about personality changes, eruptions, etc. the only thing negative it did to me was when I took it in the morning I would be very sleepy by 4pm or so. Fell asleep driving once on it. So I take it at suppertime and I don't have that problem. For me it has been the best working, cheapest allergy medicine I have used, but probably would have never tried it if I had read all of the negative reviews first.