!!! CW: light suicide, disorders, depression, injustice/neglect, sexual etc talks
FYI: 1. Olanzapine is an atypical antipsychotic; 2. I got diagnosed with schizophrenia 3 years ago.
As you may not know I took took this shit for 3 years, from 5mg and quickly went to 15mg, and although it was wonderful at the start, things with it just got bad, real bad. So much so that I was almost killing myself (well not my conscious me but whatever)! I also had just learned doctors often just give you insane prescriptions without caring, so in order to save myself, and for science (science takes sacrifice), I had to be selfish, stop taking it entirely, and not tell anyone (because I'm scared shitless of them forcing me to take it again). This is a exactly 2 months clean report, and I feel incredible most of the time now, like I'm alive again (there are other problems now but theyre not remotely as bad).
Bad?
Oh yeah. It was mainly 3 big things that constantly were destroying me: The Induced OCD, The 14h Sleep, and (possibly as consequence of the two others) The Crippling Depression. Other than that, I was practically neurotypical with the drug.
As for Induced OCD, I think it started a while after the 15mg transition, I really don't remember, which made me struggle a lot to find the cause of it in latetreat when I was trying to get rid of it. I started collecting the symptoms, and denominated it "the tic". I was getting really annoyed by it, but when I wasted my energy trying to explain the entire thing to anyone (it's kinda impossible to put the symptoms into words (and if you insist, read it below)), they either didn't care, or said they also had it or knew someone who also had it, or dismissed saying "it's normal". Even my psychologist and my psychiatrist (same one who prescripted the medication) dismissed it. Yeah no, I didn't have this in my whole life, and it was severely impacting my QoL because I knew every 5 days I would be useless and in suffering (not very fun being unable to do anything (even sleep)).
Latetreat I tried telling family to lower my dose or just completely stop but they're all purists and just said "no". So I decided to test every habit I had and... nothing interesting happened (but at the very least I managed to get a PB of 3 months without touching myself, which got some insightful data). I took vitamins and magnesium for a while which interestingly extended the OCD interval to 15 days, got me thinking I was finally free, but as one would say "a felicidade dura pouco", and after that all the accumulated OCD days got unleashed at once and it was back to normal but worse, because i'd have weird breathing all the time. Therefore, I think I was almost sure it was caused by olanzapine, but to stop I would have to get selfish.
At the very end I started reading some more about mental disorders and read something about induced OCD linked with olanzapine, I can't find it anymore tho, but it was aligning with OCD in a lot of aspects, so now I just call it that. If you're curious about the details of the Induced OCD, and/or want to try to be smarter than my doctors and find what it really is, here is a wall of text I wrote at the very end with I think all of its mechanics (manually translated from portuguese by me), (and if you discover something, let me know about it!):
so, everything i know about the tics is that they can happen between 4 days to 1 week from last tic, they start 98% of the times after 18h (but i couldn't test if it's really 18h or the awoken time) and they reset around 13 hours later, which is almost always when i'm sleeping. what happens during the tic is impossible to explain, first my brain just can't or it's extremely hard to process texts, i keep repeating the read of the same phrase multiple times, i become quite forgetful and on the outside i look very thoughtful [as in, distant], i forget things that i just thought to do or was almost in the act of doing like when grabbing a spoon i can forget everything in the moment i open the drawer. i keep looking at everything again to check if i hadn't forgotten anything for several times and sometimes in this obsession there is some other thing of another task that i forgot like previously mentioned. just like the text i also cant watch videos that arent sufficiently distracting. the worst is that my breathing becomes terrible, it becomes manual and gives an anxious feeling. besides the rechecking everything obsession there's also some things that my brain keeps repeating to me that recently i can only reply with "who knows?" [actually in english]. i also have an obsession of aligning everything perfectly like my cellphone in the table or my foot in the floor tile or my shadow or keep playing[?] with my hands, and in this i just keep looking down aligning every single step. i also cant close my eyes to sleep if i'm not dying of sleep. so the only thing i can do usually for some 6 hours until i have a ton of sleepiness around 2 or 3am is to watch things that distract me enough to forget everything. about 2 hours i lose with the obsessions. it's hell, it destroys my schedule and i can't to anything that i love doing the rest of the day, i have to accept to lose almost an entire day because with the olanzapine i already sleep 12 hours which is another issue.
As for the 14h Sleep, maybe the psychiatrist said something about that in the start (I only remember them warning about weight gain), but anywhere you look, with most antipsychotics, they say it gives sleepiness/restlessness. Just awful, I barely had time for anything, and remember, that was combined with the OCD every 5 days. Some days I would only do chores and obligatory tasks, and for a time I somehow still managed to write a whole C program with the little time I had (took me like 4 months (I was very noob at C)). There were people who put the fault on me and that I should just wake up earlier, but it doesn't work like that; I did want to wake up early, I tried a bunch of things to force me to wake up. And a lot of the time in bed I wanted to get up but my body just refused. I also didn't know if it was dysphoria or the medication, as some people reported having long sleeps because of dysphoria. And I'm not joking when I say 14h.
As for the Crippling Depression, it started weak mostly in latetreat, with crises generating demons in my head telling me what to do (often telling to end it all as final verdict of a long and exhaustive judgement). The crises happened every other month but quickly got to every other week, lasting for days. This was destroying me and I felt it, got on a life dillema, but my conscious part was unaffected by them, so I chose life and was able to escape by just stopping the treatment.
Another motivation to stop was that nobody really knew if it was schizophrenia or just depression, and if it was depression I would not have symptoms again after stopping.
There were a bunch of other symptoms that I was not aware about, and I'm going to mention them later.
Clean
Having moderately studied about the mechanics of schizophrenia I tried preventing it now or weakening it by keeping disturbances at a minimum. I started drinking water and set a discipline for sleeping, reducing interacting with stuff that melts the brain to a minimum, these kind of stuff.
From night to day I was feeling incredible like I never did. Like 95% good. OCD, depression, sleepiness, all instantly vanished. The only withdrawal symptom was the sleep got terrible for about a week, the first and second day I was getting exhausted from doing stuff because I didn't sleep in these 2 days. Then I would just collapse and wake up again 2 hours later, my sleep felt like I wasn't sleeping (but I was rested so I was) and I think I would frequently have those jumpscares. After a week it was mostly normal.
My sexual function quickly came back which was fun for a while, but then I increasingly started getting attracted to everything (with the olanzapine I had close to zero sexual thoughts (which was awesome))! It got so bad I was getting attracted to myself in the mirror, or a toothpick called Hornet. It was really awful, because my brain just breaks and doesn't behave normally when it gets these 'attractions', the brain sends awful signals which give awful sensations. It got me thinking about the relationship of medications and sexuality. So nowadays I'm studying on how to get the zerosexuality back, and lowering the libido consistently (as you might guess nobody except me wants to zero out their libido/sexuality so I'm diving on uncharted territory). I'm being quite successful in the libido part although I'm pretty sure after a while of you playing tricks on the body it just starts increasing it manually (we'll see).
For a random week in month 1 my body also weirdly had a withdrawal symptom and I lost sexual function again. But it was temporary
My mind is back to just not shutting up, which was something I liked that vanished when I started olanzapine. It was very bad in the first day I got out to do something downtown, I always got very distant, thinking about a million things at once. I tried just not thinking but it was impossible, and I just went to sleep when it was bad, which works pretty well. Getting a distraction, like using the computer, also makes the brain shut up, but I don't think it's healthy long term. It usually gets worse when I'm tired, but nowadays mundane changes from habit (like going downtown) don't seem to make the brain go as crazy.
Talking about getting tired, my reasoning gets pretty bad when I'm tired that I just can't maintain a dialogue if the person is not talkative. I was really scared of losing the conversation abilities I built this year, and it seems (strong seems, because I don't really remember how I was in end olanzapine) I'm indeed losing it gradually. My texts are getting shorter and I'm taking longer to find a response. My humour and comicalness seemed to get a little worse too, I feel I'm more dark and pessimistic and serious with my comments, although some people told/implied I haven't changed soo I don't know.
Most of the paranoia, delusions, stuff that I typically had in schizophrenia 1, I now have the tools to manage. Usually if I detect them I already kill them. As said, I don't want the schizophrenia to come back.
After the terrible withdrawal sleep was over, my sleep became awesome because now it's natural instead of artificially imposed upon me. I just need a lot of discipline because the body will always obey my sleep time choices. I now sleep an incredible and exact 8 hours! I can also feel good in going to sleep and want to just chill, and it's way more dynamic, sometimes I get tired in the middle of the day and sleep a little. This takes a lot of micromanagement though, having to coordinate how much I slept so I can adjust when I will sleep the next day, or having to forcibly sleep less so I can wake up earlier for the upcoming days. It was really tough in the start because my body didn't want to fall asleep, then I would get oscillations between sleepy and not sleepy, but now if I'm a little tired I can just chill in silence and the shutdown quickly comes. With olanzapine it always forced shutdown 2-3 hours after taking the medication, and when I was awake I just couldn't close my eyes to take even a nap.
Soon after I stopped I also managed to accept myself pretty easily, and I started to focus more on small progresses every day rather than huge transition goals, which made it a lot easier to keep going and have motivation. I'm getting increasingly detached from binary/social stereotypes too (as in, I'm increasingly getting more neutral even to things regarded as very masculine).
My spectrum of feelings, emotions, etc. got a lot wider now, and thus I feel a lot more connected to humanity. I can cry a little bit quite often, feel sad, comfy, anxious. Maybe the meaningful memories are stronger too but I don't know (I didn't do very crazy stuff in the olanzapine). Now that's not to say I couldn't feel these in any way with the olanzapine, but they were very weak, short, and rare. I always attributed the lack of feelings to dysphoria, and this could in fact be a dysphoria/euphoria effect which got affected by the stopping, with all the feeling 95% and accepting myself. We'll see.
I think I'm getting sick and hurt myself much more often now. These two last weeks were one of the worst in that regard (in the scope of this year). This last week specifically I had from mostly very mild up to occasionally terrible pain in random parts, which is something I remember I constantly complained to myself in schizophrenia 1 ("everything hurts" as 2021 redngee would say), which probably vanished when i started olanzapine. Weird stuff.
There were some days I got extremely anxious and couldn't concentrate on anything at all, mind rushing, and terrible memory and making mistakes. Got me wondering if ADHD feels like that, if it does, well, that's tough for the folks with ADHD. I'm still pretty bad at focusing on stuff without my mind having an idea and me just changing what I'm doing to see that idea (and then maybe spending the entire day focusing on that). My memory also got extremely bad, most things short term I'm forgetting, often because I'll just start thinking about something else without having solidified the previous thing in my memory. As for long term... I don't remember.
Talking about anxiety, around one month in I started destroying my fingers again because of anxiety, for the first time in ages. First it was biting the left hand's fingernails, then I put a glove and it stopped, but now I keep poking my fingers cuticles with the same hand fingers, so they never heal and creates callus (I might try doing the same glove technique actually).
It also became hard to swallow pills again. I tried taking a Dorflex a few times and the body would just refuse to swallow for a while. I fear for the day I have to take a gigantic pill again (like those for the intestine).
Final Verdict
So was it worth it? Oh well I didn't have a choice so that's a dumb question. Not having IOCD or depression feels... normal, but looking back it's great. I'm mostly happy and very functional in society now and that's all that matters I guess, of course there are still 6% remaining for that dreamed 101%, and we're working on that, and it got way easier to work on that now.
I thought there was a bunch of good things, but reading it it seems like I got a lot of small complications. In fact, small, and thus relatively easy to solve or just insignificant. Really the worst thing I care about is the sexual{ity, thoughts} stuff, because it directly impacts my QoL, how I feel in my body and how I deal with people, and it's the hardest one to control. Oh, and also the reasoning or thought organization of course.
Looking back now at the olanzapine mechanism, it seems it starts blocking some stuff in the brain and that helps for a while but then after a while everything starts to get blocked and you're left with nothing, no feelings, and crippling depression (who would've thought blocking 80% of serotonin receptors would be a good idea am i right?). I don't know, I'm not a doctor or biologist, or chemist, I'm just reading the Wikipedia article and thinking. Doctors, biologists, chemists, feel free to correct me (but don't start thinking I will edit this paragraph).
I also took a quick look at the effects of other antipsychotics another day and they're definitely not flowers that you want to smell. Risperidone makes you sleep all day, apart from a bunch of other problems like raising prolactin in 90% of users, and something something blood clots (tho probably quite rare). As I remember, Clozapine can give induced OCD too, and it can either be the perfect antipsychotic or fuck up with your entire body. There is a bunch others but they're niche. The internet makes it seem worse than it really is of course, but it gives an idea of what to expect when olanzapine of all things already does all this stuff.
Some bad things reappearing make me believe I do indeed have schizophrenia (not just depression), but it could just be temporary or my memory problems. Which sucks, schizophrenia sucks, like, you have to choose between having all these horrible stuff, or all these different horrible stuff and physical dependence as a bonus. hahahaha I just hate human bodies so much man.
So yeah, as my dad, and trans people, would say "You know yourself better than anyone, better than your doctor, and better than a thousand words" "You're the best endocrinologist you can have". Don't trust doctors blindly I guess, and sometimes, being a little selfish is actually a good thing. Hah, this might be the first time a thought inducing thought from a rando actually helped me.
There will be a 4 month report, and from then I guess testing is over, I'll tell my new psychiatrist about it and pray they don't vaporize me or something. It hurts a lot having to lie to my mother too.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Gudbyee