BipolarCentral
Your One Stop Source For Information On Bipolar Disorder

Loved One With Bipolar Disorder?
Discover How to Cope and Deal with
Your loved One's Bipolar Disorder

Do You Have Bipolar Disorder?
Learn the Secrets to Cope and Deal
With Your Bipolar Disorder

Child With Bipolar Disorder?
Learn How to REALLY Help
And Support Your Child

Dating Someone With Bipolar?
Secrets to a Successful
Relationship Revealed

Marrying Someone With Bipolar?
Learn How to Support Your Spouse
and Avoid Common Mistakes

Need Money Because of Bipolar Disorder?
Learn How to Be Successful Even if
You are Dealing with Bipolar Disorder

Drug Addiction and Bipolar Disorder
Secrets to Beating Drug Addiction
When Dealing with Bipolar Disorder

Need Affordable Health Insurance?
Information You Can't Live Without
If You are Dealing with Bipolar Disorder

In Debt Because of Bipolar Disorder?
Get out of debt fast!

Improve Your Emotional Health
Reduce Your Stress Levels and
Increase Your Brain Power

Schizophrenia
What About Drug Side Effects?

National Institute of Mental Health

Antipsychotic drugs, like virtually all medications, have unwanted effects along with their beneficial effects. During the early phases of drug treatment, patients may be troubled by side effects such as drowsiness, restlessness, muscle spasms, tremor, dry mouth, or blurring of vision. Most of these can be corrected by lowering the dosage or can be controlled by other medications. Different patients have different treatment responses and side effects to various antipsychotic drugs. A patient may do better with one drug than another.

The long-term side effects of antipsychotic drugs may pose a considerably more serious problem. Tardive dyskinesia (TD) is a disorder characterized by involuntary movements most often affecting the mouth, lips, and tongue, and sometimes the trunk or other parts of the body such as arms and legs. It occurs in about 15 to 20 percent of patients who have been receiving the older, "typical" antipsychotic drugs for many years, but TD can also develop in patients who have been treated with these drugs for shorter periods of time. In most cases, the symptoms of TD are mild, and the patient may be unaware of the movements.

Antipsychotic medications developed in recent years all appear to have a much lower risk of producing TD than the older, traditional antipsychotics. The risk is not zero, however, and they can produce side effects of their own such as weight gain. In addition, if given at too high of a dose, the newer medications may lead to problems such as social withdrawal and symptoms resembling Parkinson's disease, a disorder that affects movement. Nevertheless, the newer antipsychotics are a significant advance in treatment, and their optimal use in people with schizophrenia is a subject of much current research.

NIH - 1999
Posted 04/09/2004

Back to Article List

This Week's Bipolar News

Living With Bipolar Depression
North American Press Syndicate  
(NAPSI)-The more you know about a condition such as bipolar disorder, and in particular the depressive episodes of the condition, the better able you may be ...

Harvard Psychiatrist Must Suspend Clinical Trials Over Conflicts
InjuryBoard.com
The New York Times reports, “Dr. Biederman’s work helped to fuel a 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder and a ...

Fortunate Folks Like To Give Back
Detroit Free Press  
"It came out of the pain I had inside of me for many years," said Prechter, whose Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund supports groundbreaking genetic ...

Click here for all Bipolar News.

Featured Article:

Being the Ultimate Perfectionist

                                                           By Michele Soloway Sexton

I am the ultimate perfectionist.  Yes, me.  I even got a fortune cookie one time that said, "You have a yearning for perfection," do you believe that?"  Even Confucius knows it!

But it's a real battle for me.  I expect things from myself that I would never expect from anyone else, and it really messes with my bipolar disorder, because, well, no one's perfect, and no one can live with that kind of stress.

So I was talking to someone about it lately, and they told me, "It's ok to strive for perfection, as long as you don't expect to arrive at perfection."

It's ok to make mistakes.  That's what I've been learning.  If you don't learn that, you'll be bound up in fear (another thing that's bad for our bipolar disorder). 

Click here to read the entire article

Terms of Service | Privacy Policy

Copyright 2004-2008, BipolarCentral.com