Ding.
After three of my Drs finally consulted together and deemed Abilify the evil, weight-gain drug I always knew it was, with my psychiatrist’s blessing I started to decrease my dose. I thought about not writing about my withdrawal experience, but hopefully this post may provide to some a bit of the first-hand info I was looking for a few months back.
I complain about Abilify a lot, but first let me say the med isn’t entirely spawn from the Devil. It definitely has an important place in my history. It was wonderful for stopping my mild psychosis cold turkey and keeping me on a stable plane when I needed it the most.
The trouble with Abilify – as with pretty much all the drugs in the anti-psychotic class – is it makes you gain weight. Sometimes a lot of weight. And when you’re already battling self-esteem issues and have some heavyweight health issues in your family tree, that’s not at all desirable. After 32 pounds I said, “Enough.” It also makes you feel medicated. Very medicated. My memory is practically nonexistent, so that was another driver for wanting off of this med.
Several people warned me that going off of Abilify wasn’t going to be easy. They are right. Although it took a relatively small dose to keep me stable (7.5 mg), that translates to even small incremental dosing changes having big impacts. My personal experience is that a 2.5 mg drop in dose resulted in confusion, motion sickness, vision disturbances and generally feeling pretty horrible. I was on the lower dose for only four days and had to retreat back to 7.5 mg and regroup. Be forewarned, if you have something important (like visitors coming) or stressful (be it good or bad stress) then it is not the time to try to titer down.
One positive effect was the water weight did begin to drop. At the rate of one pound per day, even though I was keeping up my liquid consumption. Just goes to show that my muffin face is not the product of too many baked goods ( 
).
After consulting with my psychiatrist, we have agreed on the every-other-day plan of attack. That means 7.5 mg one day, 5 mg the next, lather-rinse-repeat for two weeks. Then we’ll reassess.
The moral of the story is if you’re trying to wean off of Abilify, be patient and vigilant for any unusual side effects. And, be willing to adjust your dose up again if things aren’t going your way.
Round 2 began yesterday evening. Stay tuned. Hopefully the every-other-day angle will be more successful.
Oh, Vivien, I so hate this for you. I know you’re going to give this your best shot, and you sound like you’re looking at this with clear eyes and realistic expectations. All good. This will be a long process, so please keep writing about it. Let us all support you.
Thanks so much. I was thinking about your comment today when we booked our family vacation. It is going to be a long process, so if I’m not weaned off by Sept 1, that is just going to have to be OK. Don’t be so hard on yourself, right? LOL
RightRightRight!
Good luck. I think it’s interesting to see how different people respond to different meds. I took Abilify for 2-3 weeks and it did nothing for me. Except give me akathisia. Which to me was more hellish than depression . . .
Good luck with the weaning approach, I hope it works for you! I’ll be interested to see how it goes, as it might be an approach applicable to other meds too.
cymbalta is evil too
Oh, yeah! I wound up in the hospital with that one. Meds. Although I’ve found oxcarbazepine works great, sometimes I wonder if meds are worth it.
Abilify Withdrawal – Round 2 | Manic Muses
This is the first useful article I’ve read on getting off Abilify. Thank you for posting it. I’ve been off Abilify for about 2 weeks and the withdrawl symptoms are just appearing now. Restless legs, insomnia, irritability, anxiety. None of it is unbearable at this point, but it sucks. I may have gone off it too quickly. Was at 5 mg daily for about 6.5 years. Tapered to 2.5 mg daily for two weeks. Then I stopped. This is all being supervised my my psychiatrist. I’ll be happy to tough it out if it eventually goes away. If it does not, I’m going to just get back on it and stay on it indefinitely. What do you think? Ed
It’s tough, I’ll tell ya. It took me eight months and two bouts with mild psychosis to kick this stuff. For the last ~two weeks I had to take Xanax and go to bed. But, it was very much worth it in the end. Every person I know remarked on how much more alert and how much more like a person I am without this drug.
It’s not impossible, just incredibly hard for some. When the side effects of weaning off became too much, my doc would jack my dose up just a bit, let me settle, and then we would continue the titering down. It’s a lot of work, I won’t lie.
Let me know how you’re getting on. Good Luck!!!