The Saphris began making me extremely drowsy and overly sedated, such that I wasn’t able to take it any longer during the day for fear of falling asleep and missing appointments, as had happened. The phenomenon of sudden, inescapable sleepiness is one I have experienced before on Geodon, and which necessitated me stopping that medication as well.

So, at my last psychiatrist appointment, I requested to be taken off the Saphris; we settled on Abilify as my new antipsychotic, as I have been on that medication before with no major side effects. Blessedly, the terrible anxiety attacks I had been suffering for the past three months (the duration of my stint on Saphris), ceased immediately once I stopped taking the Saphris. So, I can only conclude that the Saphris was the culprit of those dreadful spells.

Now, some semblance of normalcy has returned to my daily existence, and I am able to feel once more in control of my day and my productivity, limited as that sometimes is. Another observation from this experience is that life became extremely painful and nearly unbearable when I had to reduce my dose of Saphris to only evenings. With the Abilify now on board, the sense of despair, pain, and existential fear that I had been feeling without adequate protection from an antipyschotic, has gone completely away.

There are a lot of voices out there on the internet, and indeed, in my own life, that believe medications are unnecessary, and ultimately harmful. But I think I have to side with my psychiatrist, at least from my current vantage point, that the antipsychotics do seem to have a neuroprotective function, and seem to keep my lived experience within certain protective boundaries, saving me from the nearly unendurable pain of living without them. In short, they make life bearable, and enable me to live a more or less normal, albeit limited, life.