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YMMV ... for me, klonopin's a godsend

Posted by bob on March 24, 2000, at 22:26:04

In reply to Re: generic version of klonopin - Jill , posted by Cam W. on March 24, 2000, at 19:31:28

Amanda, and anyone else interested in or worried about klonopin for that matter,

There are some watchwords a lot of us here in Babbleland use quite often -- Your Mileage May Vary.

That doesn't mean that people who say they've had great difficulty with a drug haven't had those problems -- it means that it may not happen to you. It *also* means that when people like me stand up and say things like "klonopin has been the single most effective psychotropic medication I have been on", no matter how true it is for me, that it will be the same blessing for you. As Cam has so articulately pointed out several times on this thread, different people have different responses to the same medication because while some of us may share symptoms, our underlying genetics and brain chemistry may be quite different.

I can't tell you how klonopin makes me feel, because that's not what it does for me. Klonopin makes me NOT feel the constant raw-edged nervous buzz that had been so omnipresent in my life that I wasn't really consciously aware of it until it was gone. Cam talks about how, sometimes, folks like me who have this "loss" of anxiety believe the med isn't working, expecting that they should be feeling something, anything.

I guess that's another way in which this med has been a blessing -- the change for me was subtle but profound and immediate. I cannot, to this day, describe well enough the way I **used** to feel ... but I am very aware that it is gone. And that's a Very Good Thing.

I've read through a couple of recent editions of "handbooks" on psychopharmacology to research the meds I've been taking forthe past few years, and I haven't found a single medication in any of them that is prescribed for depression and/or anxiety that DOES NOT say its supposed to be used for a fixed time, two years at the most, and then gradually stopped. The indication in these handbooks is that one to two years on an antidepressant should be sufficient to cure anyone of their depression.

So much for academic, scientific knowledge.

I would hazard a guess that those "lifetimes" for being on a medication have more to do with grant cycles and publication pressures than with the reality that people with neurological disorders have to face after the funding for the study dries up. At least that's my experience as an academic and a scientist (from a different field than clinical psych) who has dealt with getting funded and published.

Anyway, in making these sorts of decisions, having information from multiple perspectives is important. After spending some time around here reading, you can't help but get educated on the sorts of issues you should address when starting or changing meds. It's helped make me an informed, intelligent partner with my psychiatrist when it comes to decisions on my meds instead of someone who just sits down and takes whatever script is handed over. That sort of knowledge helped me convince my pdoc that I had shown over the course of 18 months that I don't respond to SSRIs, and so a different class of medications might be better (now, I'm on nortriptyline for my AD). When the nortrip needed a boost, I was able to go to my pdoc with three different strategies involving 6 or so different meds ... when he hit me with "let's increase your dose on the nortriptyline", I hit him with my research and my own perceptions of what might work. We decided on ritalin augmentation, and it's been a very promising month since that visit.

Whatever path you take, good luck with it!

my two cents,
bob

 

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