Abilify To Disabilify

I went to a community mental health center because I was having serious panic issues after having plastic surgery. guilt and shame over my vanity. Anger at the situation and that I had to wait so long to afford this... Feeling like a teaching hospitals guinea pig...Obsessive fear over complications, my head a mess from all the opiates, hard-core antibotics, body-image distortion, releasing all the pent-up angst I had harbored from having a near disfigurement, issues dealing with not feeling right from not smoking after having been one for 17 years. ( had to quit before/after for healing)... You can catch my drift...

At the age of seventeen I was 5'8 and 207 pounds. Finally at 22 I got down to perfect weight and maintained it through off and on bulimia until I was thirty. I'm trying to summarize my weight problems briefly yet throughly here as Whoa- how boring. At 30 I beat the horrid bulimia once and for all and have never gone back once.. Beat it all on my own with no help and no weight gain. Finally at 35 I was able to surgically tummy tuck away the terrible loose skin, stretch marks. basically a 180 belly on a 140 pound body.

After all this guess what the "nurse practitioner" tries to prescribe... ABILIFY !!! a drug that has touted itself as the " not too bad with weight" atypical anti-psychotic. It took me only a few hours of research to discover that this is not true at all and is known to cause massive, rapid weight gain even if one does everything right. The scary thing is that no one really complained of increased uncontrollable hunger, just undeserved ravaged metabolism weight gain. This is not in a few rare cases, it seems to be in nearly everyone. On a side note it also makes people nervous and gives them insomonia,diabetes,increased pro-lactin levels( breast cancer)... decreased white blood cell count, akathsia ( which sounds like sheer hell).. It just goes on and on...

I finally won the battle though arrived a bit battle scarred and I'm susposed to take this crap, trigger bulimia ( which rapid weight gain of that magnitude surely would push me to )Restretch my skin, blah,blah,blah... UNREAL !!!

Im sure that abilify has helped many people too, but we never hear of the positive stories, do we? Of course, your mental health should come first but I'll accept in this case that your weight/body is closely interwoven into your mental health. Others, for example, could tolerate weight gain on medication and not be bothered by it too much. In then nurse's defence, she probably had no experience of eating disorders and might have naturally assumed that you were then fine with your weight. Unfortunately, whether you have an eating disorder or not, obsessions about your body and weight are difficult to get rid of.

Kevin

Hi Chucky,

Thanks for your reply... In all fairness I googled abilify + saved my life and helped me... I will take back my statement in regards to the weight gain without overeating , I found many more more reports where people described uncontrollable hunger... As one person put it - Marijuana munchies gone nuclear. A few reported weight loss - A FEW ... mAYBE 1-3 out of hundreds of people... The grand majority in my opinion did indeed describe a toxic nightmare. Yet, A FEW did give glowing reviews, the best - I've been taking psychiatric drugs for 26 years and finally I found ability and I have never been better. There were A FEW more along those lines, a very rare minority. My suspicious side does hunch to the fact that there could be drug company reps infiltrating these boards with the outlandishly rave reviews- or at least some of them.

In all fairness to the nurse I was there for a medication prescription ... That was the only purpose of my visit as usually you see a therapist and they work in conjunction together, I felt some pressure from the therapist and wanted to get along... The nurse really had nothing else to do for me as anti- depressants are a no-no for me. Offically weight gain is still not a side effect but anyone in that business certainly ought to know diffrently.. I do not see her as an evil Nazi... I actually found her likeable and pleasant - on a personal level...

In all fairness I have always been very biased towards drugs and I just feel it to be WRONG, something inside myself just screams it. I am new here and the pain and hell these people are going through is just unbelievable,just not right. May science some day finally get it right as in my opinion we are still in the dark ages and its scary.

That's okay Lucky. If one has a view on something and looks for more info, they might unintentionally just look for the bad things. Look at it this way though: If all of these drugs in existence were terrible in every patient who took them, then why would they still be on tghe market? They must, in hindsight, be working in a lot of people too.

I understand your skeptical view of drugs in general as I once had that view too. If I look at my own situation though, I strongly believe that I would have either killed myself or would be in prison by now were it not for the anti-depressant I took.

Kevin