Q: I was placed on serequel 400 mg and lithium 300mg a day then i was
forced off of them cold turkey without my doctors knowledge or approval. I need
to know the dangers that I faced being taken off of these medications.
Dear Mr. D' --
As you can imagine, there's not much research on stopping medications. That
would be tough to study. But we have learned, from a variety of indirect
sources, that stopping lithium fast seems to be more likely to lead to quick
return of symptoms than tapering it (e.g. over several months, not just
weeks or days). But that's pretty moot at this point, eh?
There are no clear "dangers" in stopping these medications
other than having your symptoms come back, perhaps come back harder than where
they were before taking the medications. That's why we generally taper this kind
of stuff. However, at least we can say that by current understanding, there is
no "withdrawal", especially no physically dangerous withdrawal but not even the
kind that people sometimes get when stopping antidepressants.
We won't get into how the medications got stopped.
Good luck getting reorganized here.
Dr. Phelps
Published March, 2006
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