My Medications for Schizoaffective Disorder

so like many people who are mentally ill I take a lot of medications my medications are the reason that I can live a productive happy and independent life and I'll forever be grateful for that and this video I'm going to be talking about the specific medications that I take to help manage my mental illness and if you don't know already my name is kit and I have schizoaffective disorder which is a condition where someone experiences symptoms of schizophrenia such as delusions and hallucinations but also symptoms of a mood disorder either bipolar or major depression and if you're wondering I have the bipolar type of the condition and for the purposes of this video I'm just going to be covering the medications I take for my psychiatric treatment not other health issues and so let's get started on me telling you all the medications I take for my schizoaffective disorder to start off I'll go back to the very first psychiatric drug I ever took and that was Lamictal or Lamotrigine as it's also commonly called Lamotrigine is an anti-convulsant that's actually also used to treat epilepsy and for me I'm prescribed it as a mood stabilizer so it helps me with my bipolar depression I've been on it for nine years now and it seriously changed my life and it's amazing like it works so well the next one is Zyprexa or it's also called olanzapine and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands it's one of the most powerful antipsychotics in existence and even though Zyprexa is an antipsychotic medication it actually treats my mood side better than it treats my psychotic side and I was actually put on Zyprexa because I had delusional thinking and was hallucinated constantly but when it actually kicked in the effects on my moods were better than that of Lamictal and lithium combined and I've been on it for around four years now I did take a break briefly last year when I tried to switch to a different medication but nothing worked as good as I practice this I just went back on Zyprexa and hopefully I'll be taking it until I die and the next drug is Good Old Reliable lithium lithium really gets a bad rap but it's honestly an amazing drug and the thing is lithium actually it's yes it treats Mania and that's what a lot of people know it for heck that's what the FDA approved it for but it's actually really effective at treating bipolar depression and that's the original reason I went on it unfortunately I wasn't able to tolerate the side effects as well over time and so I ended up negotiating with my doctor to take a lower dose and that lower dose does have neuroprotective effects like dendrites in my neurons are regrowing in my brain while I take it which is pretty cool and it also has a lower risk of me unaliving myself which is also great so that's why I take it but I take it at a really low dose the next drug I take is Zofran but you also might know it as ondansetron It's actually an anti-nausea drug that's used to treat a wide variety of things for example they give it to chemotherapy patients before they well undergrowth chemotherapy but I take you to treat my OCD who would have thought that an anti-nausea drug could be used to treat OCD and Zofran actually really helped me deal with my anxiety as well because one of the things that happens when I get really anxious is I do throw up and sometimes if I have like a really stressful thing that I have to do at work I'll just wake up nauseous and the first thing I'll do is go to the toilet however if I take ondansetron the nausea goes away and so that's really for me where the true value of it lies and like yes it does treat OCD and it does help that but I'm more in it for the anti-nausea effects and here we come to the Controlled Substances portion of the video so I take two controlled substances and the first one I take is Ativan or you might also know it as lorazepam and Ativan is a benzodiazepine it's an anti-anxiety medication that I take as needed to deal with severe anxiety it's extremely helpful I get 10 pills a month and that's honestly the perfect amount and the other controlled substance I take on a regular basis is Ambien or you might also know it as Zolpidem the type of drug that Ambien is is called a sedative hypnotic and I'm happy to say that yeah it actually does do the sedative thing pretty well and you might be wondering okay kid Ambien is not a psychiatric medication why is it an enlist Etc and it's because I take it to deal with the side effect of another drug and that drug is Lamotrigine so in the early days when I first started taking Lamotrigine I started having these issues where I would be falling asleep in my classes I was still in high school at the time and I was actually voted most likely to fall asleep in class as my senior superlative and I'm still not sure how I feel about that but I went back to my doctor and I said hey I'm falling asleep a lot I'm having issues staying awake and whatnot and as it turns out lamotradine actually keeps you from having deep sleep in some people and I was one of those people and so my doctor prescribed me Ambien in order to give me that deep sleep and I've been on it almost as long as I've been on Lamotrigine so I think I said nine years so coming up on 10 actually which is wild to me but yeah ambien's a great job on to the next one and I have a few other dogs that are more on an as needed basis and the first one of those is Clonidine so clonidine is actually an antihypertensive medication meaning it lowers your blood pressure when you take it but it also has psychiatric uses as well it's really cool because it actually works to get me out of a rut when I have the urges to harm myself self and I don't know how clonidine gets rid of those urges I just know that it does and I'm eternally grateful for that and the best thing is that I haven't had to take it in a while so I still have it just in case I need it but it's been it's been months now which is which is really exciting and in even more rare cases I have it to also treat agitation when I'm in manic episodes because I get irritable and irrationally angry at inanimate objects that haven't done anything to me and I've noticed that when I take clonidine for that it also kind of calms down that aggression which I'm also grateful for and I know I keep saying I'm grateful for this I'm grateful for that but like I'm just really happy in general that I have medications that work for me so you'll have to forgive my excessive gratitude the next one is benztropine or it's also called cajentin it's an anti-cholinergic medication meaning it actually blocks acetylcholine which is a neurotransmitter and it's used to treat Parkinson's now I don't have Parkinson's but I do have medication induced parkinsonism so I have some symptoms that are very similar to that of a Parkinson's patient and it's because Zyprexa that amazing antipsychotic I talked about earlier messes with dopamine in my brain and dopamine is a key neurotransmitter involved in movement so you can understand how messing with the dopamine can cause unwanted movements and so the biggest thing I deal with is I have a resting hand Tremor like this so when I don't take mycogentin my hands shake and given my job requires me to be very precise and accurate I have to take it at work so I can do my job but the benefits to taking Zyprexa far outweigh having to take a anticholinergic medication a couple times a day like it's a solution it's fine and I don't have any weird side effects from the benztropine it just stops the tremors so I'm super super glad that works the kind I have lasts six hours so I take it in the morning and then I take it at night when I'm about to go to sleep so I don't get like restless legs or anything and so this next thing are actually supplements I take and I don't take a ton of supplements I'm not really big into supplements actually I avoided them for the longest time but my doctor convinced me to go on two and I will tell you about those now and so the first supplement I'm going to talk about is fish oil and it's not any type of fish oil I take it has to have a certain ratio of eha to DHA and when that ratio is met it actually helps with mood and depression and some other stuff so I take two massive fish oil pills every day and I hope they're working but it's not like I'm going to go off of them my doctor has me taking them and whatever he tells me to take I take and the other one and you can fry this also out of my cold dead hands it'll be right next to the Zyprexa is an acetylcysteine and I originally started taking NAC to protect my kidneys from long-term damage that can be caused by lithium however after doing some Googling and a little bit of research I found that n-acetylcysteine can also be used to treat treatment resistant obsessive compulsive disorder and I'm not really going to talk about a lot on this channel but I do suffer from really bad obsessive compulsive disorder and when I went on NAC those symptoms went drastically drastically down like OCD was a really big part of my life and it was really messing with me it was really messing with my head and going on that actually snapped me out of it and helped me return to a normal state so I take 2 000 milligrams of that which is pretty high but it works really well for me and yeah pry it out of my cold dead hands and it's so weird to think that a supplement that I can buy off walmart.com helps me as much as it does but I'm not questioning it now if you are watching this video and you are thinking wow kit that's a lot of medications well it kind of is because I actually have symptoms of schizophrenia which requires schizophrenia medication and I also have symptoms of a mood disorder which requires mood disorder medication two conditions two sets of meds it adds up pretty quickly and trust me I'm not Overjoyed to take over 10 pills every night but I do it because it helps me so if you want to share what do you guys take on a regular basis there's the comment section down below course but if you want to keep the conversation going on other platforms I am on Instagram and Twitter at schizo kitso I love talking to you guys about mental health and that is all for this video I will see you in the next one bye bye

Channel: SchizoKitzo

Views: 15,854

Keywords: schizoaffective disorder, schizoaffective medications, mental health, mental health awareness, psych meds, psychiatric medications, olanzapine, zyprexa, lamictal, lamotrigine, cogentin, benztropine, lithium, zofran, ondansetron

Id: Ycw_1XQ3qBQ

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022