It’s worth mentioning here that antipsychotics have come a long way since lithium. (Posting from the US with our unfortunate (relative to the developed world) healthcare system.)
There’s a handful of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers that have been developed in the last couple of decades that have had unprecedented success with Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder. They typically cost $20,000.00 per year before insurance (mine is $0.00 per year after insurance and a coupon, and they get cheap when their patent expires (the patent-clock is 20 years and starts when development starts)). I get to lead a normal life thanks to my medication, and I have experienced no side effects besides the typical mild brainwashing (totally worth it when compared to the alternative). I have friends on other similar newfangled medication, and they have similarly wonderful results.
Please forgive the Lisp-ish parentheses. I figure it’s halfway acceptable on HN.
> Please forgive the Lisp-ish parentheses. I figure it’s halfway acceptable on HN.
Haha it did make me wander if there was an Emacs HN client with paren mode.
> It’s worth mentioning here that antipsychotics have come a long way since lithium.
It's not really related to your comment which is interesting and useful to hear in of its self.
But Lithium is not a antipsychotic it's a mood stabiliser and remains to this day a good one. It remains to this day the best evidenced for suicide reduction and intractable depression.
Mood stabilizers haven't progressed much (valproate a favoured one is now out for fertile women due to risk of ASD and birth defects).
Antipsychotics have shown astounding progress as you say, the reintroduction of clozapine in the 90, introduction of second generations, then Aripiprazole(as a partial D2 agonist was a warning shot we didn't know as much as we thought), quetiapine (made us reassess what a second generation even means as it has even less D2 affinity), pimavanserin (! No D2 but some 5HT-2a activity) And future like SEP-856(!! What the fuck is TAAR1?!).
Represent astounding progress. Should SEP-856 get a market authorization it'll turn decades of the dopamine hypothesis fully on its head.
I lump the two groups of medications together because I’m under the impression that lithium was the most popular option for schizophrenia/bipolar 50 years ago (typically associated with the diagnoses that result in the need of a mood stabilizer or antipsychotic today). Not to mention depression. Am I missing something here?
I also assumed that lithium would have been responsible for the comment to which I was replying talking about the side effects of the medications. (Lithium is known to significantly alter personality over the long term, yes? (Once again, often worth the alternative.)) The intended use of my comment was to clarify that the side effects of drugs prescribed for schizophrenia/bipolar have calmed down a lot.
You sound knowledgeable, and I’m expressing my curiosity. It’s such a soft science relative to something like cancer that I really have no idea what’s going on (I’m just a code monkey). I’m really not aware of any popular antipsychotics being prescribed 50 years ago, but I’m open to having my ignorance fixed.
Oh god so sorry! I meant useful. I found it useful to read of your personal journey.
Regarding Lithium for schizophrenia, I believe it's use only is to manage affective (mood) changes rather than psychosis.
Personality change is very hard to objectively consider. Personalities change with time, so it's harder to compare if a drug will alter someone's personality compared to being untreated for decades in an objective way.
All that said, it's commonly described that people feel different on some medications and I think that has to be accepted. Even if it's hard to objectively measure, and hard to quantify.
We often think of mental illness as distinct from personality (yet we also often see personality disorders as mental illness a paradox).
Of course then we should expect treatments will alter personality.
That said we seem to see personality changes claimed with a number of medications, from antiepileptics to statins used for cholesterol, and beta blockers.
Putting people on drugs that disable their cognition and brain function and calling it progressively effective is nothing but a crime to me. Have a good day sir.
There’s a handful of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers that have been developed in the last couple of decades that have had unprecedented success with Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder. They typically cost $20,000.00 per year before insurance (mine is $0.00 per year after insurance and a coupon, and they get cheap when their patent expires (the patent-clock is 20 years and starts when development starts)). I get to lead a normal life thanks to my medication, and I have experienced no side effects besides the typical mild brainwashing (totally worth it when compared to the alternative). I have friends on other similar newfangled medication, and they have similarly wonderful results.
Please forgive the Lisp-ish parentheses. I figure it’s halfway acceptable on HN.