Zyprexa - The Good, The Bad and The Funny. From People Who Have Taken These Crazy Meds...and SCIENCE!

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Zyprexa Basics Zyprexa Side Effects How To Take Zyprexa How Zyprexa Works & Compares with Other Meds Where to Buy Zyprexa / Ratings

Comments: My suggestion for a bipolar diagnosis is once you start thinking straight, save the Zyprexa (olanzapine) for if and when you really flip out again. I think that most everyone who lives in the part of Bipolarland where they experience out-of-control manias, either euphoric or dysphoric, should have a prescription for an atypical antipsychotic of some kind. Only experience is going to tell you which, if any of them, you get along with best. But if you haven't tried any of the others, honestly, Zyprexa (olanzapine) is your best bet for a calm-you-the-hell-down-in-a-crisis med there is on the US market. The section on how it works in your brain explains why.

I liked it in that I could think much more clearly than when I was first taking Risperdal (risperidone) in the early days of my mental meltdown, and I stayed in bed a lot so I wasn't going to do anything bad. Of course, I just stayed in bed all day long, day after day for a couple weeks. At a dosage of 2.5mg a day. But I'm lousy at clearing meds that use the CYP2D6 enzyme, so that was as much my issue as Zyprexa's. And maybe there is something to what I've been told about being the reincarnation of a comedian from Meiji-era Japan (see Interesting Things Your Doctor Won't Tell You).

When I was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital I met a couple of people who had been taking Zyprexa (olanzapine) for two weeks to deal with delusional thinking. It was doing them wonders. Sure, it took two weeks for them to get to the point where they could get out of bed often enough and for long enough to go on supervised walks outside of the locked ward and participate in the group activities, but look at it this way, it only took two weeks for them to stop thinking the totally batshit crazy thoughts all the time that landed them in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital! That is pretty damn miraculous in my book. And, yes, they were eating more than twice as much as I was each meal, but there may be something you can do about that. I'm looking into Zyprexa-specific strategies for med-induced weight gain and will put them up on the weight-gain side effects page when I find out more about it. So far the only med that mixes well with Zyprexa, weight gain and flipping out is Axid. I have all the information published about it that I could find up on the page.

Hey, look at this. A survey of German psychiatrists - what antipsychotics would you take or give to your family? 51.9% (or 28 out of the 54 who met the survey's standards) put Zyprexa as their first-line med if they or a family member started to flip out.

So is Zyprexa (olanzapine) a good long-term med for you? That depends. Obviously if nothing else works and Zyprexa does, it's the best long-term med for you and you just have to find a way to deal with the weight gain and potential threat of diabetes. Regular testing for diabetes and doing what you can in the way of exercise and other tips I have on the weight-gain side effects page is all you can do for now. Plus eat lots of cinnamon. I'll have more on this on a page specific for the diabetes threat, but it looks like a quarter teaspoon a day of cinnamon can help regulate blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

You can always try another novel/atypical antipsychotic whose side effects don't suck as much. Abilify (aripiprazole) and Geodon (ziprasidone HCl) are the two usually tried in place of Zyprexa (olanzapine) as they rarely, if ever, cause weight gain and it's a coin-toss about Geodon (ziprasidone HCl) and sedation. Just don't go begging your doctor for another med because of lack of specific side effects, as that is a sucker's game. Every med has some side effect that sucks a lot of ass. In any event, if some other med doesn't work out for you, you can always come back to Zypexa. Like most of the atypical antipsychotics, it's very forgiving that way.

Zyprexa (olanzapine) is probably the most studied novel/atypical antipsychotic when it comes to the atypical antipsychotic-antidepressant cocktail to treat bipolar depression and refractory major depressive disorder (I found sixty studies on humans and rats). It has been paired with Prozac (fluoxetine) to create Symbyax, the only medication specifically approved to treat bipolar depression. While most often paired with an SSRI of some kind. But really folks, any antipsychotic, standard or novel, paired with any antidepressant, modern or old fashioned, is going to produce this synergistic effect. The concept goes back to the early 1980s with the introduction of Etrafon / Triavil (amitriptyline hydrochloride & perphenazine), a blend of the tricyclic antidepressant Elavil and the standard antipsychotic Trilafon. It's all a matter of finding the right combination of antipsychotic & antidepressant that works for you, if you need something incredibly potent to deal with the blackest of depressions.

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Take care, and keep taking your crazy meds!

If you still have unanswered questions about this or other medications, including which one is, or combination of meds are the best for you, your best bet is to ask on Crazy Meds Talk. Better yet, if you want to let the world know how they worked out for you and want to help out others in their quest for the correct meds, join the party.
If you want to discuss your issues, I suggest checking out one of the various support groups online.
Otherwise, if you're letting me know about how much you like or hate the site, or need to let me know about medication effects in private, then just drop a note to jerod23 at gmail dot com Honestly, I usually don't have a lot of time to answer e-mail these days. The snide autoresponse message that may or may not hit your mailbox is going to tell you the same thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you one. You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time on their hands have appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their spam, viruses and the like. Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection software authors just go by the domain name, and not the IP address. So I've been blacklisted because of the actions of others. Or the software just doesn't like the domain name because of the "crazy" and/or "meds." Or your question about a particular medication will set off spam flags. So the e-mail just wouldn't go through regardless. Sorry.

Dead tree references:

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Created Monday, November 10, 2003

Last updated Monday, May 24, 2010

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