Comments on: Water titration for slow and controlled psychiatric drug withdrawal

By: Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal for Beginners « Beyond Meds

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal for Beginners « Beyond Meds — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:54:30 +0000

[...] it is not unusual to go in even smaller amounts. Cutting pills is not always enough. Sometimes liquid titration is necessary. This may involve dissolving the smallest dose pill in water… Medications also sometimes come in liquid form and can be gotten by prescription. It should be [...]

By: Gianna

Gianna — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:50:41 +0000

Hi Ana,
I’ve been told by a number of people who’ve withdrawn from both illegal and psychiatric drugs that psychiatric drugs are worse….especially benzos…

By: Ana

Ana — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:55:37 +0000

Good Gianna!
Physicians don’t help people in the withdrawal process.
It’s amazing people who are withdrawing have to be helped from other people who has already made the process alone.
For illegal drugs there’s help. Not that good but at least there’s help.
And I can assure you that withdrawing from legal drugs is as hard as illegal.
Some physicians even assure that it’s harder to get out of legal drugs than legal.
David Healy claims that for some people it’s impossible to get out of some psychiatric drug.

By: giannakali

giannakali — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:25:25 +0000

Oh Sloopy!
You get many many brownie points for making me laugh so hard!!

By: Sloopy Cowbell

Sloopy Cowbell — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:19:05 +0000

Yes, I think the powder is simply caught in tiny imperfections on the surface of the mortar bowl.

Someone said that I should use a stainless steel pestle and mortar. This one here is actually recommended for crushing tablets!

4mg Risperdal tablets, oh my! Plenty of taper doses in those monsters!

What about using a swizzle stick cocktail stirrer?

And taper in style with a long glass, poured over ice, and decorated with a cocktail umbrella and a slice of lemon.

A delightful drink for the warm summer evening.

It just needs a name.

Risperdal On The Rocks?!

Yours,
Sloopy!

By: giannakali

giannakali — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:36:24 +0000

is some of the powder still in the mortar? with water you could rinse the mortar out?

hmmm….I would find that disturbing…but I guess in reality it’s a very small amount of active drug ingredient…

I’m doing a test run of my risperdal in water titration. I’m down to .75 mg and have liquid right now, but I’m going to run out.

I have quite a stash of 4 mg tablets from when I was getting free meds so I want to use the water titration to use them up and save a ton of money!!

I’ve got everything I need except for the mixer which I’m going to try to do without…just stir it up real good…I can use a small whisk perhaps.

By: Sloopy Cowbell

Sloopy Cowbell — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:28:32 +0000

Another supremely helpful article, Gianna!

I invested in some milligram scales for micro-tapering.

I plumped for the Gemini-20 model (20g x 0.001g) supplied by American Weigh Systems (AWS).

Tested against the calibration weights, the scales seem accurate to about five thousands of a gram (0.005g).

For a cost of US$40, I am quite impressed.

I haven’t yet put them to work since I am, erm, sideways tapering (!), but I couldn’t resist taking them for a test run.

It was then that I encountered an immediate problem - the loss of powder mass during crushing.

The pill mass just goes - vanishes - somehow lost in the bowl of the mortar or when tipping out the powder onto the scale pan.

I start out with a 7.5mg Zyprexa tablet. Each pill weighs in at 315mg to 320mg. Yet after careful crushing, I am left with just 295mg of powder.

Around 7% to 9% of the pill’s weight has been lost. I certainly didn’t sneeze but maybe I breathed the dust in?! No wonder psychiatric nurses wear gloves when dispensing drugs!

I guess it’s not hard to ignore that lost percentage and calculate the taper accordingly with whatever remains.

Regards,
Sloopy!