Which do I come off first, Geodon or Klonipin or both together?

[wantaknow]

I didn't realize that one experiences withdrawal symptoms when coming off Klonipin.  I take Klonipin 2mg at beditime.  I posted a question yesterday, June 19, 2005, about coming off Geodon 120mg daily and what withdrawals I might experience, how long it would take, and what was the best way to come off Geodon.  Now, my situation is complicated.  Which drug should I come off first or can I do both simultaneously?  You know, kill two birds with one stone.  If I'm going to be sick and experience withdrawals from Geodon, then it doesn't seem to matter much if I also come off Klonipin as well.  What do you think?  How do I get myself off all these stupid drugs?  What withdrawal symptoms can I expect with Klonipin and how long and what is best way to come of Klonipin?  I wish my doctor had shared with me that I would experience withdrawals from all these drugs she was putting me on in the first place.  I was never told anything one way or the other about these drugs and the dangers involved if I were to come off them, whether I did so suddenly or gradually.  I was clueless.  This makes me angry that Psychiatrists can take a vulnerable patient and put him/her on all these different drugs and never tell them the whole story about side effects, withdrawals, and coming off them down the road.

[Roger Gould, M.D.]

I agree with your frustration. I answered the sequence question in my first answer to you...use the klonopin for cover while getting off of geodon, then go off klonopin.  Should avoid all significant withdrawal symptoms if follow this formula.

[Scott71]

I too am on Geodone and Klonpin. I was up to 160mg of Geo and 2mb of Klonopin.

I am not getting off klonopin but i have had no problems with the geodone withdrawl. I am now down to 20mg a day for 12 days and then i'm off it. Thought I'd share my experience in case you are still out there.

Scott

[Starzstuff]

A Sample of Experts Who Have Spoken Out Against Psychiatric Pseudoscience and/or the Dangers of Psychiatric Drugs

Thomas Szasz, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, SUNY Health Science Center in Syracuse; Co-founder of CCHR and author of over 25 books, including The Myth of Mental Illness, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted and Liberation by Oppression: Comparative Study of Psychiatry and Slavery

"There is no blood or other biological test to ascertain the presence or absence of a mental illness, as there is for most bodily diseases."


"Since psychiatry is a pseudoscience, it is not surprising that psychiatrists are especially eager to be accepted as scientific experts. Since they obviously cannot bring this about by discovering the causes and cures of mental diseases which—tragically for psychiatrists no less than for patients—do not exist, they have to do it by producing great quantities of gibberish. That is indeed the most constant and most frequent thing psychiatrists do, in speech as well as in print."


Fred Baughman, M.D., pediatric neurologist, Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and author of the upcoming book The ADHD Fraud—How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children

"Psychiatry has yet to validate a single psychiatric condition/diagnosis as an abnormality/disease, or as anything 'neurological,' 'biological,' 'chemically-imbalanced' or 'genetic.'"

"The fundamental flaw...is that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have never been proven to be a disease, or anything physical or biological."

"The invention of diseases satisfied medical-economic needs. Additional income for growing numbers of psychologists and psychiatrists is generated.... Presently, child psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and special educators in and around the U.S. public schools nearly outnumber teachers...."

Julian Whitaker, M.D., Founder of Whitaker Wellness Institute, author and editor of Health and Healing newsletter

"When psychiatrists label a child or [adult], they're labeling people because of symptoms. They do not have any pathological diagnosis; they do not have any laboratory diagnosis; they cannot show any differentiation that would back up the diagnosis of these psychiatric 'diseases.' Whereas if you have a heart attack, you can find the lesion; if you have diabetes, your blood sugar is very high; if you have arthritis it will show on the X-ray. In psychiatry, it's just crystal-balling, fortune-telling; it's totally unscientific."

"I took one [depression] test, entitled the Zung Assessment Tool, at the Prozac website. You respond to 20 phrases with one of the following: not often, sometimes, often, or all the time. Phrases include, 'I feel downhearted, blue, and sad.' 'I have trouble sleeping through the night.' 'I eat as much as I used to,' 'I have trouble with constipation.' 'My mind is as clear as it used to be.' 'I am more irritable than usual.' 'I find it easy to make decisions.' (As you see, some of these questions are confusing, if not irrational.)"

"I selected 'sometimes' for every phrase, as a normal, healthy person would. My score was 50, and I was advised to show this test to my doctor and 'ask him or her to evaluate you for depression.'"

Mary Ann Block, D.O., osteopathic physician and top-selling author of books including No More ADHD

"ADHD is not like diabetes and Ritalin is not like insulin. Diabetes is a real medical condition that can be objectively diagnosed. ADHD is an invented label with no objective, valid means of identification. Insulin is a natural hormone produced by the body and it is essential for life. Ritalin is a chemically-derived amphetamine-like drug that is not necessary for life. Diabetes is an insulin deficiency. Attention and behavioral problems are not a Ritalin deficiency."

"If there is no valid test for ADHD, no data proving ADHD is a brain dysfunction, no long-term studies of the drugs' effects, and if the drugs do not improve academic performance or social skills and [they] can cause compulsive and mood disorders and can lead to illicit drug use, why in the world are millions of children, teenagers and adults…being labeled with ADHD and prescribed these drugs?"

Ron Leifer, M.D., author of In The Name of Mental Health

"Everyone is neurotic. I have no trouble giving out diagnoses. In my office I only see abnormal people. Out of my office, I see only normal people. It's up to me. It's just a joke. This is what I mean by this fraud, this arrogant fraud.… To make some kind of pretension that this is a scientific statement is...damaging to the culture...."

"There's no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, 'I have a biochemical imbalance,' I say, 'Show me your lab tests.' There are no lab tests. So what's the biochemical imbalance?"

Ty C. Colbert, Ph.D. author of Rape of the Soul: How the Chemical Imbalance Model of Modern Psychiatry has Failed its Patients

"We know that the chemical imbalance model for mental illness has never been scientifically proven. We also know that all reasonable evidence points instead to the disabling model of psychiatric drug action. Furthermore, we also know that the research on drug effectiveness/efficacy are unreliable because drug tests only measure efficacy based on symptom reduction, not cure."

"Diagnosing someone as schizophrenic may appear scientific on the surface, especially when biopsychiatry keeps claiming that a genetic brain disease is involved. But when you step back and observe from a distance what these researchers are really doing, you wonder how they can justify their work….This is not science. This is simply the mathematical manipulation of meaningless data."

John Breeding, Ph.D., psychologist and author of The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses

"Even the most ardent Ritalin/ADHD enthusiasts find absolutely no positive long term outcomes on anything in their research reviews. Short term there is only one—conformity in the classroom."

"These drugs are being prescribed without any objective scientific evidence of the existence of any medical disease. Even the National Institute of Health Consensus Conference on ADHD in 1998 stated, 'an independent diagnostic test for ADHD does not exist'....The widespread drugging of these children is a fraud being perpetrated against...children and families."

Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., Harvard psychiatrist, author of Prozac Backlash

"In recent decades we have had no shortage of alleged biochemical imbalances for psychiatric conditions. Diligent [hardworking] though these attempts have been, not one has been proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been found, it was later proven false."

Paula Caplan, Ph.D., author of They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal

"I have made no attempt to document the long, horrific history of mistreatment and misdiagnosis by mental health professionals of all kinds but (to document) the truly astonishing extent to which scientific methods and evidence are disregarded as the handbook is being developed and revised."

"If you stop drinking coffee, you get irritable, get a headache. That doesn't mean you're mentally ill," she said. "Anytime anybody ever suggests a new category should go into this three-pound DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], we should ask if there's a drug company connection."

Margaret Hagen, Ph.D., author of ****** of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice

"Unhappiness is a problem; it is not a disease. Low self-esteem also is not a disease. Eating too much is not a disease, and neither is eating too little. And, despite a huge lobby to the contrary, drinking too much alcohol is not a disease either...the psychological establishment has defined virtually all less-than-desirable behaviors, from hatred of first grade to serial rape, as psychological diseases, and represents itself as uniquely able to provide the necessary 'therapies' for them."

"There are a great many ways to do science badly, and the junk science that makes up the bulk of the body of 'knowledge' of clinical psychology manages to exemplify every one of them….Our legal system has been told that clinical psychology is a scientific discipline, that its theories and methodology are those of a mature science, and our legal system has believed it. Given the deplorable state of the 'science' of clinical psychology, that is truly unbelievable."

Samuel Blumenfeld, Ph.D., educator and author of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education

"It's a crime to drug children when there's no true reason for it. They have nothing wrong with them. They don't have to be drugged. And the drugging, of course, leads to a drugged society. We are supposed to be saying, 'No—Just say no.' And yet, in the schools these kids must say, 'yes.'"

"There must be something wrong with an education system that requires so many children to be drugged just to attend school. You cannot reform education without first divorcing it from behavioral psychology."

Karen Effrem, M.D., pediatrician, EdWatch [national education reform group] board member

"America's children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses."

"Mental health diagnoses are 'subjective' and 'social constructions' as admitted by the authors of the diagnostic manuals themselves."

Elliot S. Valenstein, Ph.D., author of Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health

"[T]here are no tests available for assessing the chemical status of a living person's brain."

"It is well established that the drugs used to treat a mental disorder, for example, may induce long-lasting biochemical and even structural changes [including in the brain], which in the past were claimed to be the cause of the disorder, but may actually be an effect of the treatment."

Lee Coleman, psychiatrist and author of Reign of Error

"And if you read about the history of psychiatric treatment what becomes very apparent is that unlike most of the rest of medicine where there was at least some scientific rationale…in psychiatry, even to this very day whatever you decide you want to do to somebody, if you call it a treatment, you can do just about anything you want to."

"Whatever was done to make this person more manageable would be simply called a treatment. And then it would all get defined within the medical framework. And the sad reality is that many of these so-called treatments were in essence torture…."

"Now people who promote the medical model in psychiatry, which is the vast majority of the field, love to proclaim that they are medical but it's basically a fond hope of psychiatry. Something they'd love to have turn out to be true but despite they're best efforts, it's not turning out to be true."

Colin Andrew Ross, M.D., psychiatrist and author

"If we just stop here and we step outside the biological brain disease model and we look at the actual facts and the actual data, there are no facts and data supporting the brain disease model and there's no facts and data supporting many treatments and many things that psychiatrists claim."

Richard DeGrandpre, Ph.D., author of Ritalin Nation

"How can millions of children be taking a drug that is pharmacologically very similar to another drug, cocaine, that is not only considered dangerous and addictive, but whose buying, selling, and using are also considered a criminal act?"

Lawrence B. Hooper, M.D., Hooper Medical Center

"…the thing that we find most often, is that these (antidepressants) are not discussed with the patient. And the patient is out there in a quandary, not knowing what to do. Therefore, they keep taking the drug. Some of these drugs, of course, cause suicide. And that's a big issue. And I don't think that that's stamped enough on the minds of the individuals who start taking these so-called SSRIs [Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors]."

"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a farce. What it is, is a book that contains thousands of symptoms that have a number to it. When you bill the insurance company, you can't say the word—you've got to say the number. And they have numbers for the most ridiculous things, like arguing with your mother, or peeing in the bed or arguing with your sister."

"I take it as an insult to the field of medicine to allow a manual like that to be shown to anybody who has any respect for the field of medicine."

Moira Dolan, M.D., medical consultant

"The so-called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is really anything but diagnostic or statistical for that matter."

"…[T]here is no objective scientifically valid test which actually documents any physical, biochemical or anatomic abnormality in any mental illness."

Doris J. Rapp, M.D., environmental medical specialist and pediatric allergist, leading author including the book Is This Your Child?

"A wide variety of complaints, including over-activity, fatigue, bed-wetting, inappropriate behavior, and even epilepsy, in some children, may be due to allergies. Allergic infants can be so hyperactive that they rock their cribs about the room or bounce them off the walls and begin to walk earlier than normal. By isolating and correcting this, the child can be helped so that there are no symptoms and no need for drugs."

"If your child is exhibiting these types of behaviors, first take them to a competent doctor of environmental medicine and have them properly tested. It could not only make your parenting years much more enjoyable, it could save your child's life."

[KittyMeghanLeah2]

I agree w/ wantaknow, do not kill 2 birds w/ one stone. I have found Klonopin to help me cope w/ zoloft withdrawls.  I also have tried to get off both at the same time, not a good idea at all, I was actually vomiting, hallucinating, dizzy, very anxious more so than before, and all kinds of sensory disorganization occurred.

I would not recommend or even try to get off 2 meds at one time. Klonopin should tide you over until you're ready to get off it, but be careful..  If you are getting off Klonopin try to do it very very very very slowlyyy or you can have seizures along w/ an array of unpleasant side effects.

I still am on Klonopin, and I don't know how I'll ever get off.

[KittyMeghanLeah2]

Good news.. I'm off zoloft, been a week and an half, and I'm ok w/ nausea now.  I actually use Klonopin to cease nausea.  Some of the times during the last week I've felt so nauseous I wanted to smoke pot but I didn't do that.  Instead, I just popped my Klonopin and that seemed to help.  I'm trying hard not to up up my Klonopin dose, I only did that one time, took 2x the dosage but I'm back on track of "normal dosages."  I know I will have to wait at least 8 months before I even consider tapering off Klonopin.  And when that happens, I am not even sure I will ever get off of Klonopin.  I feel my brain is too dependent on it and it's very sensitive to any "lack of dose" and/or "delay of taking medication."  That's scary isn't it?