My son and I went to a psychiatrist today. We chatted about his situation, and he started to tell us it is not to uncommon to get schizophrenia from stress. Sidenote: my son has really been stressed from his sat, act, and finals, along with other activities. We told him what happened a week earlier, he must have presumed my son had schizophrenia…but he has no symptoms at all now. He prescribed me sapris at a low dose. I just do not think it is a smart idea to give my son a medication that effects brain chemistry, when he is completely normal. I need help I really do not want to give it to him. I feel extremely sad reading all the stories of other parents, god bless you <3
If we put this in terms of a different problem like a heart problem… bare with me…
lest say your son had a mini-heart attack and the docs said, “Ok, it’s time for the blood thinners before a valve completely blows out” people would be behind that.
Maybe the doc in your case is looking at it like it’s time for the stabilizers before the big break.
Either way, if you don’t think the doc is right, would a second opinion hurt?
Good luck.
None of this is easy to figure out. Is your son not experiencing symptoms because he is taking medications? That is something I sometimes have to caution myself with. My son is pretty much symptom free and has been for awhile now and part of me questions his SZ diagnoses. However I can not rule out that the meds that he is taking is the actual cause of this.
I think my son’s brain does need help regulating dopamine just as my body needs help regulating hormones.
i strongly feel you need to get a second opinion…this is too serious to play with…good luck
I am the same way, feel the same way. If I feel ok now, if I take a pill now, I don’t know if the pill is working or doing anything, right?
I won’t take pills that are not actively providing a therapeutic benefit.
Instead, I eliminate the stressor.
My doctor tried to tell me taking the pills would help to prevent it from happening, but I’m not going to risk the side effects to my body, like they want to give me a pill and then monitor my liver, or my white blood cells. why risk my liver or my white blood cells…
that’s my opinion. doctors pass out pills and get paid to do so.
You can get a psychotic reaction out of stress. It doesn’t mean sz automatically. In Sweden you need to have symptoms of sz more than 6 months to get the diagnose. Or shorter when on meds.
But all ppl reacting to stress with psychosis are not schizophrenic. There are short psychotic episodes that will pass quickly when the stressful events are removed and he gets some rest. In sweden it is called reactive psychosis. I don’t know if there is something like that where you live.
A second opinion couldn’t hurt.
I agree with surprisedJ, get a second opinion. Psychosis isn’t always schitzophrenia.
That being said, schitzophrenia can lay dormant for years and then come on strong later. I understand your desire to not give your son medication that he may not need.
What is the controversial diagnoses? It doesn’t seem to be that he has schizophrenia but how or why he came to develop it? Stress or Marijuana?
Maybe people should stop taking medication anyways. The secret of schizophrenia is that you can manifest reality with your thoughts.
That doesn’t work for everyone. last time I quit my meds, I was hospitalized. When my meds where switched up last year, I almost landed in hospital again.
I’d say first they really need to nail down what is actually wrong. In the DSM, there has to be persistent symptoms for over 6 months. A one time break is scary and the docs are most likely trying to figure what is really happening, but a one shot psychosis could be a precursor to a lot of things.
Trigger is very correct… psychosis isn’t always SZ. I’ve seen that bipolar also has psychosis as a symptoms and PTSD, and others. I agree with the uneasy feeling of not wanting to just reach for the A.P.s right off the bat, but just casting all meds aside might not be a good option either.
First find out what your really dealing with. Then keep an open mind and take it from there I’d guess.
Schizophrenic symptoms can come from other things than just schizophrenia. My doctor questioned me for a good while on one visit to try to figure out if my breaks from reality were caused by the schizophrenia component of me or my depression component.
I was mad (not at him of course) when I learned that serious depression can cause psychosis. All of the horrible feelings that people with depression have and this can get added to it? That’s just wrong.
So you might want to look into whether there is something else going on there that might also cause psychosis. I was depressed for years and I didn’t know it because depression had never really been properly explained to me. I thought it just meant that you felt sad all the time. I felt more numb than sad.