Back on the pills and still confused...

ON MONDAY NIGHT I didn't sleep for a very long time. Tonkie Ears the mouse was pinging about the kitchen like crazy. I eventually went to bed after it had got light. Then I was up before midday.

On Tuesday night I finally caved in and took my antischizophrenia pills. My head has been going increasingly crazed ~ in the literal sense of cracked into zigzaggy shards, like crazy paving. I don't "hear" many "voices" nowadays in the way you might expect: that someone is talking when nobody is there. These days I hear random syllables, and they push and pull through my brains shaking them up as they go in a pneumatic kind of way. They feel sometimes distract me quite a lot. Sometimes I hear my name over and over. Sometimes they say "doo-doo-daa-be-do"; or random things like "trotter donkey". Sometimes they sound like something muttered, and I only catch the last word or two. I also heard my own thoughts spoken by strange voices in my head. Sometimes they echo around, as if I think them and somebody else repeats the last. The "hallucinations" if I can call them that, are much lower grade than they used to be. It took a few weeks off the antipsychotic pills to get as loud and as distinct as they are now. The longer I continued not taking them the more the voices came back. Which is depressing when I think about it in my rational self as it means I'm still mad and I don't like being crazy. I don't like having to take pills just to be more sane than mad (they never worked 100%). And I don't know when I would ever get a life back; on them or off them.

The pills are so powerful I was in bed before 11pm. I slept right through and woke up feeling like it was 6 or 7am; but it was half past eleven. But I did't feel any saner than normal. Random syllables were echoing around and I sat in my blue velvet armchair and pondered where on earth my life is going.

I don't feel so terribly depressed now (or manic). I feel a kind of scattered distraction. If my dr hadn't told me I had a schizophrenic sort of thing going on I'm not sure I'd have been able to match what he told me with what I've read with what I've experienced. I don't think I'd be able to explain. I was never quite sure that what happens doesn't happen to everyone. I don't remember it ever happening to me before some point in my mid 20s, when Prozac originally set it off. A psychiatric person told me that one of the phenomena is a common symptom in certain mental states; it's called "thought echo".

No illicit drugs have ever caused anything like that, by the way. I only "heard voices" on drugs three times that I know of (you can only know that happeed by reviewing your experience and realizing that something you took to be real at the time could only have been a hallucination, which takes quite some concentration and insight to achieve).

So this is what's been happening. I've given in and taken psychiatric meds again. I know at least one person in NA would consider that "using" if I told them. NA can take a hike. In their collective experience hallucinations only occur when you're on drugs but in the past years I've hallucinated much more off drugs than on them, and the hallucinations have a different quality. LSD, for example, typically evokes intricate geometric designs, not voices. It makes you see abstract things, not actual objects, as I did in my manic swings. It's mania that made me hallucinate floridly. Mania lights up the brain like a christmas tree ~ brain scans have shown this. In that state just about anything that happens happens to you more vividly. I say "just about" because in that state I was impervious to cold. I never noticed my windows were wide open in January until my hands seized up enough to cause difficulties typing.

I got up too late to go to NA last night. I got to my methadone chemist just minutes before they closed. The post office was shut already so I couldn't have withdrawn "B money" (gear money) even if I'd wanted to.

Those antipsychotic tablets have really done me in. I feel heavy-limbed and unsteady and I very nearly got the bus 2 stops to my methadone chemists because I couldn't handle the thought of walking there.

So that's today for ya. I just want to go to bed again. I hate being on pills. It's bad enough being on methadone which keeps me physically OK, without having to take something else to be mentally OK. Most people are mentally fine on methadone ~ so why I shouldn't be too..? Does anybody know enough about this to comment? I don't get why I of all people should be more sane on heroin than off it.

I've got to go now. That awful game show where people pick boxes with random amounts of money inside is on and I've got to change channels. Cheery-bye now...

;-)


THE ROYLE FAMILY: Baby David's Christening Party
This is my favourite Royle FAmily episode of all. Everyone is drunk:





PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY OF RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-prescriber



RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-taker; she describes 4mg as far too much ~ 4mg is my dose!
also she does look a bit manic, despite all those meds she talks about...