Chris has the go-ahead by his psychiatrists to start lowering the Serdolect. (He is on 8 mg Serdolect and he remains on 10 mg Abilify for the foreseeable future.) I am not necessarily optimistic that this will be the beginning of the end of the medications, but I’m willing to entertain the thought. The problem the last time, despite the fact that the psychiatrist recommended a program of supplements and slow, methodical lowering over a one year period, was that Chris relapsed anyway eight months after finishing the reduction program. So, I tend to take it all with a grain of salt.
This time I consulted a website that instructs Chris to pre-taper for a week before the taper by adding certain supplements such as Omega 3 and Body Calm. Then he begins an exponential process of lowering his meds by 5% every fourteen days for a total of six weeks, waiting two weeks, then reducing every two weeks by 10% until the end. The number of vitamins he needs is minimal to the thirty-five supplements he was on the last time.
I hesitate to leave the process entirely to Dr. Stern, mainly because doctors have a reputation of lowering the medication too fast. Whether or not anything we are doing will define the outcome remains to be seen. Chris is also thinking about starting yoga classes, which in addition to his chakra spinning sound therapy and the books he reads hopefully will give him the resilience he needs to successfully pull this off.
Chris has been on medications for six years, and only off them for a brief period of about a year. I must confess to feeling a bit jaded about the outcomes. We can do everything right and he could still relapse. There is more to relapse than blaming it all on the meds. So, we will try to maintain a calm, non-judgemental environment. We will not put pressure on him do start any new directions.
Have you and/or Chris read the Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs? Seems to me to be one of the best resources on the net.
I think, it’s extremely important to be prepared for traumas/emotions to surface again in as far as they’re not resolved in the meantime. But there are other ways to deal with it than to go right back into “psychosis”. Did you see Will Hall’s latest post on Beyond Meds ? Some people might say, he’s still experiencing symptoms, so he’s not recovered. I’d say, he’s experiencing his own humanity, what it means to be a human being in this world, in a somewhat more intense fashion than most people do. What makes him recovered is that he’s very much aware of it, to an extent that “madness” can’t take control. That’s the important point, IMO. Not to avoid, fight, resist, eliminate, etc. “symptoms”, but to know what they really are and mean.
I hope it goes well! Unbelievable how antipsychotics are nearly impossible to remove.
Sincere good luck from here.
Thanks for the support and the tips!