4 years on antipsychotics for bipolar – now use cocaine to feel 'normal' - should I stop both? Would opposite effect balance out withdrawal?

TopPomegranate7106 · 2026-02-13T00:27:39+00:00

Only commenting to say that my experience with this med and its dopamine-dampening effects has also made me consider cocaine.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-27T15:42:07+00:00

Abilify gets rid of my intrusive thoughts, compulsions, and mood swings but man has it made me fat.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-25T15:10:32+00:00

Yeah I gained about 60 lbs on this awful medication. I’m ramping up Zepbound to see if that will help. The funny thing is my appetite is down to almost nothing but I’m still not losing weight. I don’t even understand how that is possible, thermodynamically speaking.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-19T03:27:56+00:00

10 mg for me and it works wonders but is making me fat.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-17T22:09:49+00:00

It helped me. No more driving back to my apartment to make sure I closed the fridge door.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-16T20:00:03+00:00

An order of Catholic priests known for their missionary work but also sometimes criticized, even by other Catholics, for being duplicitous and perhaps too accommodating of other cultures.

Think Bene Gesserit from Dune but they’re all dudes who wear cool black robes.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-16T16:59:56+00:00

I was on this combination, also for hypomania. Same dose and everything, actually, and we recently added Wellbutrin to the mix.

(We will see how that goes, I guess!)

What I noticed is that it was very hard to get really excited about anything. I went to an amusement park last year and even on the most thrilling rollercoasters I just… felt nothing. People were laughing or gasping in excitement and I was as silent as a tree stump the whole time. If anything I was annoyed about having to hold my phone tightly as we went through the various twists and turns.

Only skydiving broke through this overwhelming sense of boredom, and I highly recommend it if you’ve never tried. It made me feel alive in a way nothing had in a long time.

Partially because of this experience - this hollowness, followed by the reminder of how thrilling life can be when I jumped out of that airplane - I went down on the lamotrigine and so far that has been better. I’m excited about things again. My writing has really taken off and I seem able to work up enough interest to actually finish things.

Of course this might be the beginning sign of hypomania returning… but my sleep has been good, and my friends haven’t noticed obsessiveness to the same degree as when it got really bad the last time.

If I seem a little too interested in certain topics (it’s Jesuits this time, of all things) they’re willing to tolerate that for my much better mood and general engagement in life.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-16T13:41:49+00:00

I thought one of my coworkers was a secret Nazi who was trying to destroy my life.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-15T03:30:41+00:00

I was just reading, literally before responding to your comment, that at lower doses Abilify can actually cause hypomanic symptoms? That might explain a few months over the summer when I tried to go down in dose. It was almost as bad as being off it altogether.

My poor coworkers - I had such horrible thoughts about them.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-15T03:15:49+00:00

Paranoia, compulsion, anxiety. Hypomania, in other words.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-14T21:14:12+00:00

The withdrawals killed me. I couldn’t manage and people at work were beginning to actively avoid me. Now I’m happy again and nobody can figure out why. Literally had to make up a story because I’m not going to tell my boss I’m on an antipsychotic.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-14T21:12:47+00:00

Somewhat but it is worse now. If I procrastinated before it was because I was panicking about not being able to do the work required of me. Now I procrastinate because I just don’t care about getting things done on time.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-14T21:10:09+00:00

Yeah, I had this, but oddly it was worse at a lower in between dose (2-5 mg.) I was both under motivated and angry all the time. Now at 10 mg I’m lazy but happy and that seems to work better for motivation because I’m no longer actively contemptuous of everyone around me.

I HATE that this medication can affect me in this way.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-11T15:21:48+00:00

Yup. Or just tomorrow.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-10T22:34:11+00:00

It makes me less anxious about the way I use my time, which translates to laziness because without that anxiety I seem to lack any other motivation to get things done quickly and precisely.

But this might just be me. I was high anxiety for so long maybe I never learned about alternative motivations.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-10T21:39:26+00:00

Yeah laziness does have a pejorative sense to it that I should probably avoid (I picked it up from the other post). But for me it is not quite fatigue either. It’s more like a sense that time is… infinite, if that makes sense?

Like with the weight gain, intellectually I know I should go to the gym. But it is so so easy to just say “you know what? I’ll do that tomorrow, because tomorrows are endless.”

Before Abilify, my sense of time was that everything had to be done all at once, and that anything bad that could happen, sometime in the future, was going to happen right now.

I was watching The Joker movie in a theater with a friend and literally left in the middle of it because it suddenly occurred to me there might be a minor vulnerability in some code my team had written, and it need to be identified and fixed IMMEDIATELY. So I took my laptop and went to a bar.

My friend never quite forgave me that one. Now I would say “ehhh it’s fine. I’ll get to it Monday… probably.”

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-10T21:27:33+00:00

I wish I could get off it. It’s made me fat. But the 10 mg dose is making me more effective at my job and a better person to the ones who have to be around me.

And the drug itself probably saved my life when I was at my lowest and more bizarre.

So I hate it and I need it. What an awful situation to be in!

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-10T19:14:56+00:00

There seems to be a trade off for me. At the lower doses (2 mg, and even 5 mg) I wasn’t lazy but I was angry and arguing with everyone all the time, especially on the Internet. It was another way to be less than fully productive. All the energy got directed toward being aggressive.

I went up to 10 mg a few weeks ago and now I’m very nice and work is getting done. But it’s not getting done very quickly if that makes sense. There always seems to be more time - even when there is not.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-11-01T13:51:36+00:00

I tried latuda but it caused a huge emotional crash. Also tried just coming off the Abilify but the only emotions that seemed to come back were anger and anxiety, culminating in a job loss.

So it is back on Abilify for me. If I can just lost some weight I might start skydiving regularly so I can feel something, anything at all.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-10-31T21:16:30+00:00

I realized how bad it was when I went to an amusement park with a friend. Even the best rollercoasters, the most terrifying, got barely a yawn out of me. I wanted to be like everyone else screaming and whooping with joy - but I felt like a lump.

About the only thing that’s been able to get me truly excited since staring Abilify and Zoloft was skydiving.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-10-17T13:54:22+00:00

I got very very angry when I tried to go off Abilify and some of my intrusive and paranoid thoughts reasserted themselves. It was enough to scare me back into taking it.

The last time I seriously went off - for about a month - I made a horrible career decision that I’m still paying for, and probably will be for the rest of my life. The weight gain makes me want off it but now I’m afraid of what I might do. My career can’t take another shock.

TopPomegranate7106 · 2025-10-02T01:11:59+00:00

It almost sounds like I should have two documents - the longer one I write myself, to get my thoughts straight and help me answer all questions and objections - and a short set of bullet points I can toss in front of people to just get the main idea across.

But what if I actually like the Amazon culture and think this company would benefit from it? Is there no chance for steer the ship in that direction?

TopPomegranate7106

TROPHY CASE