Effects of antipsychotics on people with DID?

*Trigger warning* for upsetting psychiatric experiences.

I have difficulty writing about this stage of my life so I apologize if this doesn't make sense.

When I was a teenager, I was suspected of having a psychotic disorder. My parents had good health insurance and even though I really didn't act psychotic, they got convinced of this by doctors who were ill-informed.

But in the end, I was given many different antipsychotic drugs which I tried to avoid, but in hospitals they have ways of making you take drugs apparently (though I don't remember that) and at home, I don't know what I was thinking. I had very bad side effects from them, extrapyramidal side-effects and other effects. None of them seemed to make me better, they made me worse. But the doctors and parents thought many of the side-effects were symptoms of me being psychotic. Finally I was given a dose of a new drug to try and I had an episode of what I now believe was neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a potentially life-threatening side effect. It nearly destroyed my life because when it was all over, I was really, really broken. My brain didn't work, my body was stiff, my kidney and liver were malfunctioning. I later was misdiagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease that I am pretty sure I don't have--it was just left-overs from that drug experience.

My parents thought the catatonic symptoms that began the moment I took my first dose were caused by my mental disorder, but I could feel myself and my ability to move or communicate slipping away. I tried to tell them that something terrible was happening and that I had a fever, but they ignored me. I lost two weeks of time. My mother told me that I wasn't able to go to the bathroom by myself, and I kept trying to pack my bags to run away, in between periods of just staring into space. I remember the moment I 'woke up'--I was propped up in a chair in the living room, and I saw a pilgrim girl suddenly walk in front of me, as though exiting an invisible envelope, and then disappear as if she had walked into another invisible place. I tried to speak to her in my mind but instead I spoke out loud, and the sound of my voice woke me up. This episode cemented in my parents' mind that I was hopelessly crazy, and they told me they had no idea how to help me, so they were giving up. So I didn't have to take any drugs after that.

A couple of years later I experienced a similar (but not so severe) bad reaction to anesthesia while getting my wisdom teeth surgically removed.

I wonder if anyone else has been through this kind of thing. It's very hard to find narratives of what neuroleptic malignant syndrome feels like from the inside, I guess because the people who tend to suffer it (people with psychotic disorders) are a very stigmatized and de-voiced population.

Last night I realized the pilgrim girl I saw as I was coming out of my drug episode might be an alter--she had that same feeling of "truth" I feel when I recognize alters, and as I was sinking into the episode, I wrote something (which I didn't remember writing) that seemed bizarre but could be seen as pilgrim related. Or maybe it was just drug side effect hallucinations.

Sorry this is so long. I can't really edit it properly.

In my experience with antipsychotic drugs I experience audio and visual hallucinations, seeing in pixels, night terrors and paralyzing of one side of my body. No medicine has worked so for bc my chemicals changed according to each personality. I've been on many many many medications each dealing with a different diagnosis which turned out to be D.I.D

I haven't experienced any bad things from antipsychotics. Just seemed like none worked. No effect at all. I'm on one now that's working wonders for me. I'm on Geodon and Lamictal and have have reached the optimal dosages for each to help keep me stable. So far only 1 hospitalization in over a year 1 1/2, (which was due to a horrible misunderstanding on my part) versus 6 in about a year. So it's working.

Maybe meds aren't the way to go if it's doing all that to you. Do you have a proper diagnosis of DID? There aren't any meds to help DID but there are some that can treat the underlying symptoms to help you feel better on that level.

My psychiatrist only manages my meds and it took a long time to find the right combo. I see a psychologist for all my other issues and treatment for my DID among other things. There are a lot of people who can be treated for DID without meds, specially if you don't have any comormid diagnoses. Comorbid(hate that word) diagnoses make it harder to treat. Takes a lot longer to heal. At least that's what i've read.

I don't know if anything I said helps, but I think an official diagnosis can go a long way to help you in your treatment. To me, psychologists are better at that than psychiatrists. JMPO.

We have only tried one :

dissociative-identity/topic119441.html?hilit=anti%20psychotics

INEEDTHISS wrote:In my experience with antipsychotic drugs I experience audio and visual hallucinations, seeing in pixels, night terrors and paralyzing of one side of my body. No medicine has worked so for bc my chemicals changed according to each personality. I've been on many many many medications each dealing with a different diagnosis which turned out to be D.I.D

Thanks for describing what it felt like to you. They made me feel like I was trapped inside and not able to move normally. Plus they gave me a feeling of creepy crawlies all over my body, even inside, and hallucinations, and weird feelings of being far away, and drooling and shuffling and not being able to talk. And sometimes they made all my muscles get so tight, especially in my neck and I couldn't open my mouth or move my neck.

-- Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:48 am --

firelamb67 wrote:I haven't experienced any bad things from antipsychotics. Just seemed like none worked. No effect at all. I'm on one now that's working wonders for me. I'm on Geodon and Lamictal and have have reached the optimal dosages for each to help keep me stable. So far only 1 hospitalization in over a year 1 1/2, (which was due to a horrible misunderstanding on my part) versus 6 in about a year. So it's working.

I'm so happy meds are helping for you. At this point in my life, my symptoms of anything are not that bad. I have a lot of DP and dissociative symptoms, and I guess the usual anxiety and episodes of depression, but nothing too much. I'm lucky in that. Yeah, my official diagnosis is DID. It was long ago, like 20-something years ago, that I was not diagnosed and psychiatrists and psychologists were throwing diagnoses at me left and right.

-- Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:50 am --

TheCollective wrote:We have only tried one :

dissociative-identity/topic119441.html?hilit=anti%20psychotics

Thanks for directing me to that thread, and your answer. Reading through it I realize how, while the drug effects were very bad, the conditions for various hospitalizations and the traumatic things that happened in hospitals and around that time were as bad or maybe worse than the drug experiences. I've had PTSD symptoms due to the hospital/psychiatric experiences even more than for my bad childhood.

The symptoms nondescript describes remind me of what happens on quite a high dose. Here they tend to start people off on these whacking doses and gradually reduce it. But if it's for the wrong diagnosis anyway that's not going to help.

I was on a huge dose of antipsychotics in hospital, and I'd light a cigarette and it would burn right to the bottom before I smoked any because I was so zombie-like. And I developed a little shuffle, shuffling about with those unfocused eyes you get with them.

I've been on a kind of maintenance dose of antipychotics for years now, and I know it's the wrong thing for whatever I've got, but it does stop my brain spinning at a really fast rate and my anxiety getting out of control. I do worry about the long term effects of being on them so long, but nothing else seems to calm my brain down. It has no effect at all on my alter people being present though. They did briefly disappear when I was on the really high dose and I was sad. It might be a false memory but I think I remember knowing they're not gone for good and my brain needed to get over the shock of such a sudden high dose. And they did come back when I got used to the dose and my brain started functioning again.

Rather than hospital, things seem to have gone the opposite way now, in that there's not the funding for when you're in a crisis, and you have to go to the doctor to get some pills and be sent home again to sort it out yourself. I'm not sure what the answer is but more places for talking type therapies would get my vote

I can relate well to your experience because i had a similar one. I was also given antipsychotics when my parents were told i had BPD and that ''my mind was broken''. All they did was leave me numb, zombie like, i was shaky, couldnt think well and just overall not there. I would sleep a lot and never have energy to do anything. I noticed no improvement in symptoms whatsoever only side effects. The switching was still there too. I was just like an empty shell.