So you’ve tried to come off your meds. If you were on an anti-psychotic medication, when you tried to reduce your meds, you most likely re-experienced the mania and over-excitability that had you get on the meds. This probably caused you great alarm, and possibly dispelled your hope that you could ever maintain a life without medications.

Many anti-psychotic drugs limit the release of dopamine in your body. Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter and the conventional theory is that, by limiting dopamine, you can therefore sedate someone. This works in an impressive way, and it is therefore the choice of emergency psychiatric treatment facilities. The person’s mania subsides, the families breathe a sigh of relief and everybody goes home.

Then it is soon noticed that the person can not function on the medication. Though not manic, they are no longer capable of maintaining independence. So at some point, they and/or their family may decide to discontinue the meds.

Now the brain, being a very plastic and changing organ, has adapted in response to the medication. Since the quantity of dopamine was being held low by the drugs, the brain responded by building more dopamine receptors so that the small release of dopamine would have a greater excitatory effect. Now you can imagine what happens when you reduce the medication and the dopamine availability begins to rise. The person gets over-stimulated!

Can you Permanently Stop Being Medicated with Anti-Psychotics?

This is a withdrawal reaction. This is not to be confused with needing the medication. These withdrawal reactions can be minimized by the use of nutrients designed specifically to suit the individual’s biochemistry, as demonstrated by brain chemistry testing. These withdrawal reactions can also be minimized by a slow, deliberate and monitored tapering of the drug dosage. This, of course, is done in a residential setting, where the process can be directly observed.

A good analogy of the process would be this: Let’s say you have a village that lives on a river. The river swells one year, and some houses along the waterfront get flooded. The water in this analogy is the dopamine, and the flood represents a psychotic episode. The well-meaning town folk decide to damn up the river so it can’t flood anymore. For a while, things seem good: although the children cannot swim in the river on hot days, and there are no fish, at least there are no floods. The townsfolk even find that they can build on land that was previously unavailable to them. Then one day the damn gets full, and with a heavy rain flooding begins again, but this time, the situation is much less stable, with houses right within the river bed. All the added houses in this analogy represent the additional dopamine receptors.

So the townsfolk, seeing the error of their ways, decide that the damn must come down. Well, of course, to bring it down all at once would be catastrophic, just like abrupt cessation of a medication would flood the person with dopamine. So the method employed of getting off the meds must be deliberate, and by no means haphazard. You alert the person and their families and let them know what to expect when coming off the medication. You tell them to evacuate the low lying houses, untie the dog from the tree, and get some rafts and life preservers.

In other words, get a support group of peers that have gone through this, get professional support and whatever help is available from family. You know that the person’s having been deficient in these nutrients may have been a definite contributing factor to the original problem, and the lack of nutrients was certainly not addressed by the medications. You then let off a small amount of water from the damn. When the water subsides, you do it again. You reduce the medication a small amount and when the slight withdrawal reactions subside, you do it again.

Specific Brain Chemistry Testing and Adjusting

The Alternative to Meds Center provides the brain chemistry testing that isolates the nutrient deficiencies and underlying problems. This is blood testing and is one of the most astute analyses available. We provide peer support, which has proven to be most reliable comfort available. People who have been there and remember the trials.

We also use the services of Dr. Michael Lesser , a board certified psychiatrist who was recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement, one of only two living members to hold that honor. He has been using nutrients to stabilize his patients’ mental health for forty years.

The medication tapering is carried out within an immaculate ten-bedroom facility in San Francisco that is a registered national landmark. It is located on a quiet residential street with a two square block park and tennis courts next to it.

If you’d like help balancing, reducing and eliminating your meds, or would like to talk about the likelihood of your success on this issue, feel free to call us at 1-800-359-9698.