Clozapine

I find the whole subject of drugs very boring. Ditto for vitamins. There is only such much you can say about them when it comes to treating mental illness. For the record, Chris has been on the following medications. Respirdal, Effexor, Abilify, clozapine, Solian, Serdolect. I think he has been on enough. I thought he had been on enough after sampling only two of them. I feel I have been misled from the beginning about the medications. The hospital never indicated to us that there was another way to treat psychosis, e.g. using megadose vitamins in place of medications or through targetted psychotherapy. Ian and I were new to the game and never thought that there might be alternative theories as to what schizophrenia really is and how to treat it. We trusted the doctors to get Chris well.

We were misled about the clozapine. Chris had only been on Respirdal and Effexor, then briefly Abilify, when the doctors began urging clozapine on us. I had heard it was for the "treatment resistant" (to a layperson, it means they have tried everything else with no success and after that you are considered chronic) and so we resisted putting Chris on it. Having only tried two antipsychotics, I thought it a tad premature to label him treatment resistant. What clozapine did was to add many more pounds onto the pounds that the previous drugs had already added. Chris also had to put up with getting blood tests done every two weeks.

The doctors at Chris's program thought clozapine was marvelous for their patients - they said so often. They didn’t have to deal with Chris’s raging hunger, the fridge door always open and our food bill practically doubling. Chris was now a prisoner in his own body. Unsurprisingly, clozapine didn't improve Chris. Faced with a patient who didn't respond to clozapine, the doctors preferred to leave him on it anyway, over Ian's and my objections. It was their drug of last resort.

Clozapine is a bitch to get off of, but it can be done. You can go into the hospital and reduce it rather quickly while substituting another drug, or you can do it very, very slowly over time. At first Chris's holistic psychiatrist was reluctant to even try taking him off it because she had heard no one had ever come off it successfully. She felt that people who had been on it more than a year would not be able to withdraw. When she told me that, I was crushed. Chris had been on it two years at that point. Lucky for us she was willing to try. It took Chris one year to go from from 25 mg of Clozapine to 0.