The Prozac is gone and my son is now walking around talking to himself with no interaction with the outside world. He responds to some barked commands but his brain function is concentrated on repeating the phrases of the now notorious teaching aide. He is no longer upset or angry about thiose words or at least he is not acting out upon any such thoughts that might persist.
Yesterday night he started Geodon. It's a low dose (20mg). The lowest - which is probably the way to go with these drugs. As usual, I did a large number of internet searches to learn more about this medication. As usual, the postings were wide-ranging (miracle drug to amplified all the negatives) and mostly unhelpful. A lot of doctors start their patients with huge doses of this drug. From my experience that always seems like a bad idea. Makes me wonder about the wisdom of these doctors. As best I can tell, though, Geodon is a powerful anti-psychotic. It seems to have a mile long list of caveats. Take with food...a lot of food. Take one hour before bed. Watch for any changes in the patient. While most often used for bipolar disorders, there is a wide variety of off label uses - depression, anxiety, OCD. It looks like it's another adventure waiting to happen for us, though. The immediate effect of the drug was to knock my son out after about 3 hours. He slept most of the night. It appears that he woke up at some point, tried to do some sort of activity (word searches, I think) and then went back to bed.
This morning he was pretty much the same as yesterday - except that he slept. When he woke, he immediately started talking to himself again. While waiting for the bus, he stopped perseverating a couple of times to watch some of the neighborhood kids ride by on their bikes. When they passed, he got back to work.
While I have always found watching my son in his variety of awful states painful and upsetting, today I started feeling sorry for myself, too.
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