I've been down

Those other posts! They must wait. I am having waaaaay too much fun with the autism hub, which has become my renewed favourite autism-centric place now that autism.change.org has officially closed its doors. All will be well–it’s going to be a generalist disability blog, although I’m not sure if the url is changing (and will update my links if this is the case)–but it meant I was at a loss for autism/aspie centric news and reading for a while (and very, very bored at work–my capacity for reading fiction has gone downhill as I’ve gotten older, and I’ve become very spoiled by audio books, but there’s something silly-feeling about sitting and listening to a book, plus people keep interrupting me).

So I think I’m going to do this read and discuss and trackback thing a go. It’s what real bloggers do, right? Fuck, am I a blogger?

What has me all excited, first, is an Extremely Obscene and Offensive post by Socrates, over at his personal blog (as opposed to LB/RB–I need to add his blog to the list and will be doing so now). He discusses a study done at Indiana Univeristy, published J Child Adolesc Psychopharmacol. 2009 Jun;19(3):265-74. The study is about the use of aripiprazole, an atypical antipsychotic, in PDDNOS and Asperger’s kids whose parents felt they were irritable. Having been medicated and not very willing about it as a teen, I’m sure I was described as irritable, too, and I’m fucking glad I wasn’t put on this shit.

I’ve seen kids at my work on this med, and although it was not common it has been increasing (I think due to marketing–I know I saw ads for Abilify, the brand name, before I stopped having a tv). It isn’t approved for use in kids, as he notes in the post. This drug is commonly given for schizophrenia and bipolar. Frankly, I’m not sure why anyone thought it would be an awesome idea to give to kids on the spectrum, except that it’s expensive and they were getting paid for it. The side effects are crap, and well known for this whole class of drugs:

Weight gain is a given, sometimes drastic. Extrapyramidal symptoms, like tardive dyskinesia or dystonia, are reasonably common, and sometimes permanent. Antipsychotics can increase depression. The list for known and warned side effects is chilling. Great, your child is drooling now, but it’s not a super-big deal. At least he’s not irritable…oh, no, irritability is actually on the list of side effects. Nevermind. Brilliant study, dipshits. Give the kids something that permanently damages them and has the potential to cause what you’re trying to fix, which sounds like teenage moodiness combined with parents who tend to medicalize everything because their children have a label.

I promise never to be this sort of doctor.

I was placed on Zoloft as a teen, just before I turned 17. I was resistant–I didn’t like the idea that I needed to be medicated, first, and also couldn’t grasp that I might need to be medicated. I was given Zoloft because of the known strength of SSRIs for anxiety, which was what the psychologist/psychiatrist team felt I was dealing with (no mention of Asperger’s; although having discussed this with Mom, she can see how I recall that time–and have blocked parts of it–and interpret it through a lense of autism). Knowing that about 60% of teenagers on the spectrum deal with anxiety has helped me normalize these feelings in a retroactive way; at the time I found it very stigmatizing and the side effects of the drug did not help. I gained weight, about 40lbs all told, in the three years I was on Zoloft. I lost what ability I had to tell when I was hungry or not, which wasn’t very well-developed to start, so I kept eating because I enjoyed the taste of things–or didn’t eat all day because I was caught up in a special interest. This weight has proved very difficult to budge, and my efforts have been half-hearted and defeatist (something to work on).

The anxiety, and associated depression, label haunts me, though. It successfully stopped my application to the Peace Corps (I refused to submit to a psych eval just because I’d had anxiety issues as a teen), and is a source of teasing in my family (a constant issue). It isn’t okay for my mom to be able to joke that I should take some Zoloft when I get upset and she thinks it’s overreacting, because I was given a label of being anxious as a teenager, and it isn’t okay for these teenagers in this study to be told that their normal teenage irritation and moodiness is something bigger, something pathological, because they have a label of Asperger’s or PDDNOS.