Geodon - New med being prescribed to me?!

Geodon - New med being prescribed to me?

I suffer from bi-polar disorder. I am super sensitive to these mood stabilizing drugs and have been and tried several. Today, my doc placed me on this drug, which I have never heard before. I am very hopeful that it will be quite helpful, but wanted to hear feedback from others who had been on it, mostly regarding any side effects. That is always the kicker for me. I have been on the maker's website and it sounds promising with little side effects. Please let me know if you have been on this drug and if you have ever experienced any horrific side effects.

Thanks

I think this is a good site to get a realistic range of patient experiences with Geodon:

http://www.askapatient.com/viewrating.as...

Many of these patients didn't like it, but many did. Apparently the akathisia or restlessness was too much for some people. That is a Parkinsonian side effect of all antipsychotics, some more than others. I don't find any basis for the claim on crazymeds.org that Geodon makes mania worse. I would wonder if they are confusing the restlessness with mania. Geodon was explicitly studied in mania with good results.

I do know what a QT interval is. It's the duration of the electrical discharge that drives each heart beat. I didn't find anything about healthy people dropping dead in a way that's suspicious for Geodon causing it. The worry is that there are other meds that prolong the QT interval as well as electrolyte abnormalities, where the additive effects could be deadly. But the manufacturer has a recommendation for a level of QT prolongation above which Geodon should be discontinued. So far that seems to have worked.

The problem is in people who are sick with other diseases, such as elderly psychotic patients, where it has been documented that the risk of death in patients on any one of several atypical antipsychotics is 60 - 70% higher than other patients. Their deaths are from those other diseases, but the risk is documented for whatever reason, and not just from Geodon. That's why the FDA has the manufacturer put a boxed warning about treating elderly patients with Geodon. You can read more about that:

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/conte...
http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/zipras...

I didn't have occasion to prescribe Geodon to anyone before I retired from medicine. It's also true that my own bipolar disorder never required more than one each of an antidepressant, a mood stabilizer, and an antipsychotic at any one time, so I'm as much in the dark as any patient when I hear that someone else with bipolar disorder is being put on a second agent of similar action, in your case Geodon on top of Seroquel. Do you understand why that is the next logical step from your psychiatrist?

Part of my desire to know that is that I still have a tardive dyskinesia that comes out when I'm tired from being on antipsychotics for a couple of months each on a couple of occasions over 15 years ago. I don't know that I would have traded this side effect for whatever marginal benefit I got from those meds then. I was just going along with what was suggested. It's better if a patient is a greater part of the decision than that, though it also doesn't make sense for a psychiatrist to say, "Here, you decide what to do," even when the patient is a physician as I was.

Beginning with seeing a psychologist for depression when I was 20, I've seen about 6 psychologists and 11 psychiatrists over the years. My favorite psychiatrist was my second psychiatrist. I went back to seeing him when I came home to retire. He is head and shoulders better at communicating with me about any issue than anyone else. Many doctors are so rigid instead.

If it's not urgent that you start on a new med, maybe this is a good time to get a second opinion, if you don't think your psychiatrist is explaining things well enough. Or try the Geodon and get a second opinion, too, since I expect it will take a while to get an appointment.

There are scary things that can happen to any of us at any age. A cerebral aneurysm can pop. You can pick up some bacterial contamination in the safest place someone would guess. For myself I pay attention to what I know is a problem, my bipolar disorder and how it's always hard to know what's best for it, given that there are no blood tests or other objective ways to measure it or what treatments do to it. For that I've needed a psychiatrist I can trust, so that would be the most important issue to look at for me.