Do you know anything about Abilify, a med to add to antidepressants?
by Admin on January 2, 2009
burtongrl asked: Right now i’m on 10mg of Prozac and it helps a little but not a lot…I don’t want to increase my dosage because it makes me drowsy. I saw a commercial about adding Abilify to your regular SSRI regiment… can anyone attest to weather this works or explain what it is? thank you!
Tagged as:
Abilify,
Antidepressants,
Med
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Its a high priced antipsychotic drug, as a side effect in causes weight gain and promotes diabetes.
see the website, and click on the label informations for more details.
Abilify is an atypical antipsychotic. It along with drugs like Geodon and Seroquel were developed as alternatives to traditional antipsychotics like Haldol and Risperdal. In recent years drugs like Abilify have been approved to treat acute symptoms associated with bipolar disorder.
The potentially serious side effects of using any antipsychotic would make me very wary of using one to treat depression. One of the worst possible side effects of taking an antipsychotic when you are not already psychotic is ironically psychosis. I would recommend talking to your physician about another antidepressant.
Oh geez, I just loving reading everyones answers.
I work in the psychiatric field and I am very familar with Abilify as adjunctive therapy with the use of an anti-depressant.
Abilify is one of the better antipsychotics, in my opinion. Yes, they have gained a lot of bad media when it comes to their metabolic effects, such as weight gain, glucose level increases, and their lipid profile. But Abilify is one of the much better ones. It is gaining FDA approvals left and right lately, just recently it has been approved for (in low doses) to help w/ depression.
To get Abilify as an adjuctive treatment, you must have tried 3 antidepressants (in different classes, SSRI, SNRI, TCA or the new generation antidepressants) and failed on them. You then must have another antidepressant and have shown some improvement, but not much, then adding Abilify will work. Honestly, Prozac 10 mg is very low, theraputic ranges are 20-60 mg every day. I would try increasing it first, give it a few weeks, and if it fails, I would switch to something else. If you show little signs of improvments, I would stick w/ the SSRI class, go to Zoloft, etc. If you showed NO improvement, even on high doses of Prozac, I would switch to an SNRI, like Effexor XR or Cymbalta. If you show no luck, I would try Wellbutrin XL (which is a new gen antidepressant) and then, last resort, try a TCA drug, like Remeron, etc. After you have gone through all those classes of antidepressants ALONE, you can then go into looking at adding Abilify (low dose, like 5 mg) to your antidepressant. Abilify hits on the seratonin as well.
I would not be worried about all the bad media you will hear about antipsychotics. They don’t CAUSE diabetes. On top of that, Abilify is proven to be one of the more metabolically nicer ones.
Sorry for my long answer. This is my area of expertice.