Posted by med_empowered on March 24, 2006, at 21:56:47
In reply to Re: Antipsychotics on mentally healthy people. » Boogie, posted by Phillipa on March 24, 2006, at 19:51:59
APs were used in the past on people w/o true psychiatric illness-they were sometimes used for anxiety, for sleep (I believe Thorazine was used as a sedative), for behavior control (example: "senile aggression"--old people causing trouble), and sometimes for treatment of nausea. People hated them just as much as "mental patients"--when "normals" take Haldol, for instance, they report sadness, dysphoria, anxiety, and overall unhappiness within a couple days. In terms of "causing psychosis"..now and then, a psychosis will get worse right after starting an antipsychotic, or the person will become psychotic (and they weren't before). I don't think its terribly common--its like when people take Benzos and become angry and agitated or people taking antidepressants sink further into despair.
HOWEVER..with the old antipsychotics, there is the risk of supersensitivity psychosis. Basically, giving someone drugs that blocks D2 causes the brain to make more D2 receptors, since the lack of dopamine is seen by the brain as an abnormal, pathological state. SO, if you withdraw the antipsychotic, the patient has all these new D2 receptors...once the drug is out of the system and dopamine levels are back, the brain is now super-sensitive to its own dopamine, which can result in psychosis. In some cases, this "supersensitivity psychosis" is a sort of ongoing process; a patient might start at, say, 300mgs/day of Thorazine, relapse, then keep going up and up and up....the brain has been altered in such a way the w/o the medication, the new D2 receptors result in dopamine-induced psychosis. When this happens, docs can administer an anti-epileptic (anti-convulsant) drug along with the antipsychotic; apparently, this helps stop the sensitization process.
Because of the "supersensitivity psychosis," some patients who had never been psychotic--example, people treated for major depression or anxiety or any other number of problems--reported psychosis upon stopping the antipsychotic. This has also been called the "withdrawal psychosis".
poster:med_empowered
thread:624226
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060322/msgs/624333.html