Risperdal Diary Day 5

Same effect from my night dose as on Wednesday: didn’t sleep sooner, but did feel more quiet while trying to get to sleep. Did wake up more tired than Thursday though, but the tiredness went away quite quickly. Afternoon dose had no side effects aside from the usual dulling. Can’t judge positive effects.

Called prescribing doctor today. Explained that yesterday’s afternoon dose had no effect, but the night dose did. She advised me to continue taking the med at the regular dosage and call her back next week Tuesday – since I don’t have a doctor in Nijmegen yet. She told me that I’m on a low dose, so if needed, we could increase it. I said “Rather not” but thought “No way!”. I don’t have major side effects now, but the dulling that I do experience is already enough of a side effect – and just because others don’t notice it, doesn’t mean I don’t -, so that I don’t want more of it. So far so good though. It does worry me that, from tomorrow on, I’ll be alone most of the time with no-one to be reached, should I get in big trouble again like last Friday.

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Vacation and Disability: My Challenges

It’s the season to go on vacation. I won’t go this year, of course – I’m too busy doing stuff for Nijmegen -, but I rarely go. Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, but for me, they’re extremely stressful. I remember one particular vacation, which is the worst-ever vacation I’ve had. I’m speaking about a summer camp in Russia I went to in August, 2000.

This camp had about all the problems a vacation can have for me, except that I didn’t need to plan it myself. The planning thing is the main reason why I haven’t gone on vacation ever since my parents stopped planning vacations for me.

The first problem is with an unfamiliar area. I am not the best cane traveler in the world – and at the time of this particular camp, rarely used a cane -, so I can’t travel unfamiliar places independently without it draining my energy resources. In some places, it’s even draining to walk sighted guide, like in Rome in 2004. On the camp in 2000, I walked sighted guide almost all the time, and was shuffled aroudn between camp leaders and fellow participants, with the camp leaders more often than I’d like remarking that I should learn routes and the fellow participants getting increasingly weary of me. This is, however, likely also due to my behavior, which I’ll get to later. I didn’t like being dependent in the first place, and liked it even less when I felt others were feeling bad about guiding me. However, using my cane for mobility drained my energy even more – and still does. This is a reason why I don’t like going to unfamiliar places. Other blind people may have better travel skills, but I don’t.

Another problem was that the vacation was very unstructured. I tend to do better on vacations that are centred around a certain theme – particularly, one I like -, such as ICC. The Russian camp, however, was more of the standard summer camp type of setting. There were a few scheduled activities, but you got to have a lot of free time and many activities were also optional. For example, there were workshops about every day. I chose guitar lessons, but quit after coming only twice, cause I didn’t like guitar and the workshop itself was pretty unstructured, too. So, aside from mandatory activities, I spent most of my time in my room recording journal entries on tape.

Then there was the issue of social conventions. While I didn’t even grasp social interaction between my fellow Dutch campers, I had much less understanding of social conventions that are different from what I knew to be Dutch social rules. For example, one day when we were in Moscow, I was instructed to speak the few words of Russian I knew because we were encountering police. Years later, I learnt that Russian police are corrupt and they would’ve picked us out (and not let us go our way till we paid them) if they’d known we were foreigners, but I curtly defied the instruction at the time. I also didn’t know that it was expected of me to start eating at mealtime as soon as the food was on my plate – and couldn’t watch anybody do so. As far as I could tell, it was polite to wait till everyone on my table had their food, but my camp leader got frustrated with me cause I wouldn’t start eating till she told me to.

To the other people who went to this camp, the most notable about me were, obviosuly, my behavior problems. This camp, in fact, was the first time anyone ever questioned me about them, and I crafted one of my paradigms about their origin. While I do think the fact that I didn’t like to be dependent, contributed, I also think I suffered from quite significant overload and unclarity at the time – but I didn’t understand any of these concepts then. You see, I often throw a tantrum when I feel my planning has been disrupted, and this happened quite frequently – and, well, basically, a vacation is a disruption of your planning on a large scale. Also, I noticed from later vacations, that it’d often overwhelm me to need to do several things at once: walk an unfamiliar route, take note of the things there were to be enjoyed, and socialize. When I was in Rome in 2004, I freaked out quite majorly and later found myself explaining to a teacher that I felt traveling and sight seeing were already enough of a workload, so I couldn’t chat at the same time.

Another thing was that some of my fellow participants had gotten so sick of me cause of a few tantrums I’d thrown, that they started openly making fun of me. This, obviously, only led to more frustrated and curt reactions and tantrums, which kept the circle round. While this is always a problem, it adds up to the draining from the other difficulties in vacations – while, as I said, vacations are meant to be relaxing.

Even though I didn’t go into details about my disabilities here, anybody who knows about them, can tell that quite a bit of what I describe above, could be explained by my blindness and/or my autism. However, I do not want to imply that everything that can go wrong on vacation, has to do with one’s disabilities. I was, for example, also the youngest Dutch participant (the camp had participatns from Russia as well as the Netherlands). I have little experience with camps or vacatiosn specifically organized for the disabled – this one was meant for the visually impaired as well as sighted, though I was the only blind participant in the Dutch group -, and wouldn’t know if those are better. Maybe I’ll find out sometime.

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Risperdal Diary Day 4

Called the prescribing doctor today to ask about the risperdal and what happened on Friday. She believes the panic attack or whatever was not due to the med but actually a symptom I’d been prescribed this med for. If it’d been the med, she said, I would’ve had these symptoms before. She asked about my sleeping and I said I obviously didn’t sleep much on Friday, somewhat on Saturday and fairly poorly last night. This got her to question the med’s effectiveness – which is weird, since I didn’t take meds yesterday, so no wonder that I slept poorly. She recommended I take my risperdal again this afternoon and tonight and call her back tomorrow. So I took my afternoon dose with no side effects. No positive effects either. Last Friday afternoon, I’d actually been thinking I felt some positive effects, but thought this was strange since I’d only been taking risperdal for a few days. But then again, I apparently freaked out at night. One possibility, aside from the med just not working, is that I crossed my limits on Friday afternoon cause of feeling so well – cause I did go somewhat further stimuli-wise than I’d usually go. And after all, I didn’t take meds so that I could handle just a bit more stimulation before I’d freak out, but so that I wouldn’t freak out at my usual level of sensory stimulation.

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“Like a Little Child”

Last Monday when meeting my new support worker, Arda talked about the two different “faces” to my behavior. She said that, sometimes, I behave like an adult – which I am -, yet sometimes I behave like a little child. She continued to instruct the new support worker on how to respond when I behaved like a little child. What she really meant was that he wouldn’t need to accept to be insulted by me so he would have to set clear limits on that. However, that was not what she said. No, she said that if I act like a little child, I should be treated like I’m one. This, besides not taking me seriously one bit, poses another problem: it means that you compare a 21-year-old woman with disabilities to someone of another age who doesn’t have disabilities, which is essentially comparing apples and oranges.

It seems that, for the sake of conceptualizing life with developmental disabilities for people who don’t have these disabilities, they need to assign an age group to that person’s skills or behavior, that is the age at which non-disabled children acquire this particular skill or display this behavior. People then get to generalize into such things as “mental age”. The problem is, an adult isn’t like a little child, even if that adult has a developmental disability. Adults with developmental disabilities, in many respects, display behaviors that are normal for adults. Most adults with mental retardation, at some point, become interested in sexuality, for example. This is exactly why support workers often struggle with how to handle this. If those adults had been like children, they wouldn’t have been interested in sex. The thing is, they’re adults and, like most adults, they develop sexual feelings.

Then, okay, we decide that adults with developmental disabilities have a sex drive cause their physical development is normal. So they only have the skills and intellectual understading of a child. Not true, either: many developmentally disabled adults have a disharmonious profile of abilities and difficulties. Some can read and write, but not do simple calculus. Others have some skills only in certain contexts, so that they may be able to do very difficult calculation but not pay for their own things, for example. So, what age do we assign to them? It’s not for no reason that IQ results have no age equivalent anymore.

When behavior is concerned, the situation becomes even more complex. I challenge people who say that I behave like a little child by asking them whether they’ve ever seen a little child act like I do. Many say they have, but have they really? No little child will say the things I say when I insult someone. No little child misinterprets what others say like I do. When a little child gets physically aggressive, this is considered a problem no matter the child’s age. Frankly, the only thing that makes my behavior “childlike”, is that it’s not normal for an adult. But that is not the same.

I don’t quite exactly care whether support workers treat me the same as they would a little child, because I don’t care how they treat a little child. However, I do care how they treat me. While this treatment may differ depending on my behavior, this is not the same as simply comparing me to a child of whatever age and treating me like that. I’m not comparable to a little child, simply cause I ain’t a little child: I’m a 21-year-old woman who happens to have disabilities.

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Risperdal Diary Day 3

Last night after taking my risperdal, I had something that felt like a panic attack: fast heartrate, anxiety and such. It lasted for about an hour in full force, then decreased but didn’t go away completely. I slept at about 4:00 AM (took med around 12:45 AM) and had a fairly unquiet sleep, but don’t feel sleepy now. Very little dulling. Because this possible side effect (never read that it is a side effect, but anxiety is and I found it suspicious that I experienced this shortly after taking the med) bothered me, I explained it to Jutta today. We called the family doctor on duty – why do these things always happen on week-ends? Her assistant didn’t know anything about it, so she let the doctor call me back. The doctor asked me why I’m on risperdal and I explained it’s for autism-related irritability symptoms worsened by stress. She then got to ask me about my symptoms, which I found difficult to explain, as always. She got to ask about other possible symptoms, like sweating or muscle stiffness, but I fortunately had none of these. Because of this and the fact that I had no worrying side effects while taking my meds any other time, the doctor wasn’t sure what to think. She theorized that it might be the med, but it could also be exactly the reason why I’d been prescribed the risperdal. I explained that the symptoms that led to the prescription didn’t match the symptoms I had last night. She advised me to stop taking the med for the week-end and start taking it again on Monday to see what happens. Like, if I don’t take the med now and still get these symptoms, they’re likely just another way of freaking out. I would then have to see on Monday when I take the med again what happens. I’ll take it on Monday afternoon, so when I do get these symptoms, I can reach one of the staff. This thing does make me think about ways of diverting anxiety or otherwise freaking out in the middle of the night – when you can’t take a shower, can you?

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Lots of Nijmegen Updates

My goodness, it’s July 27 and I’ve not done actual Nijmegen updating in ages! Good thing is that I can skip over all the stupidity with three different service providers debating amongst themselves whether they thought they could offer me independent living support. The third one, Werkenrode, agreed to offer me support services and they could start their service August 1. So it’s only five days that I’ll still live in Apeldoorn! I’m excited and anxious at the same time.

The occupational therapist from Sensis (blindness agency), who would provide me O&M services, had been arranged before the independent living services, so she could first come to my new house on July 10. I’ve so far practised the route to the shopping centre – well, almost there – five times. The first three times, I went with that occupational therapist. I got seriously overloaded the first time I walked the route: the neighborhood I live in, is very quiet, but there is an extremely busy crossing which you need to cross before entering to the shopping centre. There are audible traffic signals there and I finally understand why the NFB would oppose them: they added up to the already existent overloading noise level. Consequently, I freaked out significantly after returning to my new home. The second and third times walking the route, July 13 and 16, went a little better, but I freaked out on July 16 anyway cause I was afraid I wouldn’t master the route before Lidwien (the occupational therapist) went on holiday last week, so I wouldn’t be able to buy groceries and how would I manage then? We eventually arranged for my new support worker to go grocery shopping with me until I master the route.

On July 23, I practised walking the route for the fourth time, this time with Arda. It went well as far as doing it right was concerned, but I felt significantly overloaded. This may also be related to the fact that I’d been doing many other things while in Nijmegen that day. In any case, today, when I practised the route with Ellen, is the first time when I can say O&M actually felt good. I think I did quite well as far as O&M skills are concerned, but best of all I did not feel significantly overloaded at the crossing – today, the problem with the audible traffic signals was that I was chatting with Ellen while I was supposed to be listening to the signal. I did walk sighted guide part of the way back, cause the back route changed recently and I’d only walked it once (last Monday) while already pretty much overloaded. However, I was able to walk most of the route using my cane.

On Wednesday July 18, Marjan called Jeanine with concerns about my stress, anxiety, unclarity and freaking out. She made some agreements with her about how to handle situations in which I keep repeating myself to the point of freaking out, and this phone call also led to the proposal to arrange for me to see the doctor I saw this Wednesday. Marjan informed me of all she’d talked about and told me to think about the meds thing and ask Renee to call back Thursday, but I called Jeanine myself to say that I wanted the doctor’s appointment and you know the rest.

I got to meet my new support worker – at least for now, he was available and so it might change after the summer holidays – last Monday. Don’t feel good about it, but this may be cause of how the discussion went. Arda was with me and made some comments about my behavior, essentially saying that if I behave like a little child, I should be treated like I’m one. She meant setting clear limits, which I agree with, but I did not agree about the wording. It got to be quite an argument between Arda and me after the new support folk had left. However, I clarified my points in an E-mail yesterday and we seem to agree on almost everything. Arda will add these points to her final report on me, which is a good thing. Ironically, Marjan, who created the draft final report, says she had little in it about my behavior.

Lastly, we were filling out some forms for something called WMO yesterday. WMO is a law that entitles people with disabilities, elderly people and other socially disadvantaged groups to services such as equipment and housekeeping assistance. We had to fill out the forms cause I want cab funding in Nijmegen. I rarely use taxis now, but may when I’ve not yet mastered all necessary routes and still need to travel places, like to university or agencies. Housekeeping assistance is also available through this law, but CIZ (the agency that determines who gets funding for support/care services) still decides on funding for this. We’re not yet sure how to ge thousekeeping assistance exactly, but my new support worker will look into that. This will likely be starting by September, which may mean a slightly less clean house than normally, but well, most students have a dirtier house than mine is likely to become. Funding for all other services does seem to have been arranged. CIZ did nag a little about day support (which is aimed at supporting people in their work/daycare or equivalent) cause they felt college-related support did not fall within the scope of these services. They said it was “unusual” for someone to request support for college-related reasons. Well, it’s pretty unusual for someone to be blind, intellectually capable and autistic all at once. Now, they increased my funding for “general” support (ie. independent living support) so I can get more hours of that during the first six months. After those six months, I’ll get a maximum of seven hours of support a week. This last funding decision – the seven-hour thing – has been validated for five years, my God! By the way, the CIZ thing does demonstrate how bureaucratic the healthcare system is: first, Arda sent the fundign request to CIZ Apeldoorn, they sent it to Nijmegen, who said they’d review my case, but instead sent it back to Apeldoorn, who then made this decision. Quite stupid, huh?

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Risperdal Diary Day 2

Did sleep quite well last night, and actually felt rested this morning at about 9:00 AM when I woke up (went to bed at 1:00). This is contrary to what Amanda describes, where she would sleep for 20 hours a day and feel very lethargic the remainder of the time. I at this moment do not feel as dull as I felt yesterday, and did not notice the dulling effect much last night. This did mean I felt less quiet, but it in the end it didn’t have a bad effect. I also notice less of the physical “tiredness” sort of thing (not sure how to describe it) than yesterday. This is quite strange, as one would expect side effects to increase with having taken more dosages, and only to decrease after getting used to the med (which may take a while). Quite strange.

Checked a Dutch autism forum where opinions on neuroleptics are more nuanced than within APANA, though not overtly positive. The most common side effect for adults taking risperdal appears to be weight gain – ironically, the only side effect I cannot fill in while interpreting the doctor’s comments very broadly, ie. that she didn’t talk about at all. Lethargy and dulling were mentioned by a few people and a few others experienced affective flattening (which the doctor seemed to present to me as a desired effect). I seem to remember one person who experienced some movement difficulties after long-term use, but no-one mentions the serious stuff Amanda talks about having experienced even at the starting dose of 0.5mg/day. Does prove once again that meds do effect people very differently and this means you’ll need to judge the effects (both positive and negative) individually. This was in fact something the doctor mentioned when contemplating whether to prescribe me risperdal: that it’s best to use a medication that I have experience with. Bad thing in this case that I’m virtually a medication novice.

Slight dulling from the afternoon dose, but I had to sit in the car for two hours after taking the med anyway, cause it took us that long to get to Nijmegen due to an accident having happened on the highway and people watching. When doing O&M, I did not notice any more difficulty than usual with alertness or reactivity – but this is not to say that I didn’t have any problems, cause we all know that most drunken driver accidents happen cause the driver feels totally normal.

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Autistics and Antipsychotics: An Issue of Really Well-Informed Consent

So, why do I take a neuroleptic when I usually get into an opinionated rant whenever a parent talks about asking their doctor to prescribe risperdal to their child? It’s very simple: it’s an issue of informed consent. I know all possible side effects, including all the ones that are unusual but common in autistics, and I know what to watch for, and I think I could communicate this to the doctor (cause I did very well in explaining effects to the doctor this afternoon, too). The only thing I’m slightly worried about is not being able to tell whether a side effect is serious enough to call the doctor about, but I will note to myself to be alert whenever I experience a side effect that could possibly be a problem, even if I’m not sure if it’s worrysome enough. I also know that I do not take this med simply to control my own behavior. This is actually why I felt bothered when Renee talked about it as if it’d stop me from freaking out. Well, that is hopefully a consequence, but if all this med does – and I am a little suspicious of that with risperdal -, is to get me the exact same symptoms only to be too drugged to react to them, this stuff gets stopped the safe way as soon as possible. Others might love to have me drugged (many don’t, but they could), but I take meds for my own sake, not anyone else’s. Both of these are problems I have with prescribing risperdal and other neuroleptics to children and to adults with too little functional communication to consent.

My doctor, in fact, did a fairly poor job of obtaining informed consent. Particularly the “informed” part was bad. Like I said yesterday, if I hadn’t known APANA or other autistic advocacy groups, I wouldn’t have known about the possible dangers of risperdal. In fact, the doctor called risperdal a “not so heavy pill”, which it obviously is. 0.5mg twice daily is not a high dose, but autistics may be sensitive to meds or a particular class of meds (atypical antipsychotics, in this case) in particular. I don’t (yet) appear to be among them, but I could’ve been. I didn’t feel the doctor coerced me into taking this med, but even so, I could’ve been seriously misinformed if not for APANA to balance out things a little. And I’m 21-years-old, highly intelligent and mostly communicative with speech (though writing things down yesterday would’ve made things easier to explain). How do you think such lack of information or misinformation could’ve affected a parent, drained by her child’s behavior problems and desparate for something that will get the child to stop being majorly aggressive? Then again, it’s not the parent who will take the meds, it’s the child. And how would you think taking a medication with possible serious side effects which their parents were not informed about, without them possibly being able to judge effectiveness, and without having their own right to consent, would effect a child or a “low-functioning” adult? It would make the child’s health and safety dependent on another person’s (lack of) knowledge and judgment.

This happens with medications for physical reasons, also. After all, no child can make their own medical decisions, disabled or not. And, to use a popular curebie comparison, would you withhold chemotherapy from a child simply because they can’t give informed consent? And we all know that chemotherapy does have serious side effects. However, cancer <emis different from autism, unlike what many curebies believe. Firstly, autism is a pervasive developmental disorder. This not only means that it is part of the person’s being, but also that its outward appearance is not the same as its inner presentation. The psychologist at mental health Nijmegen said it very well, when he explained that you can only diagnose autism by its consequences. Imagine doing this with cancer! And just like initial diagnosis, treatment evaluation can only be done by its consequences. For an adult who voluntarily uses a treatment, either biomedical, pharmacological or behavioral, these consequences are self-identified and self-monitored. Hence, an adult has the capacity to evaluate their own experiences to a certain degree (this may be compromised due to sensory issues, in which case you need to be extremely careful). A child or someone deemed “low-functioning” does not have this capacity, or isn’t allowed to express it. This means that, not only do others determine treatment goals, but they are also in charge of evaluating the effects. And everyone who, like me, has experienced autistic behavior problems knows that these form only the outer layer of symptomatology. While meds will actually rewire the person’s brain, how this is done may differ from med to med, simply cause different meds may work on different chemicals in the brain. Now I don’t say that you should take neurochemistry classes before determining which med to take (if you want to learn about it anyway, see this book), but I do say that meds that could have similar outward effects, might have extremely diffeerent inner effects, on the level that is between outward behavior and brain chemistry: inner experiences. And only the person taking the meds can adequately judge these effects, unless they’re so cognitively dulled that they cannot do this anymore – which is something I need to watch for.

I know quite a few autistic adults, as I said, who voluntarily take neuroleptics. None of them are pro-cure and none of them would probably give their child a drug with possible serious side effects simply to control that child’s behavior. Neither would I. It’s about informed consent. This means I do feel the doctor who prescribed my risperdal, did a poor job of providing accurate and complete information, but to me, the source of the information doesn’t matter when I have it in mind. The one thing I do need to make sure, is that I write down anything unusual, cause not being albe to respond to Arda’s question about risperdal’s side effects (not because I don’t know them, but cause at that moment I couldn’t explain), is not a problem, but it would be a serious problem if it were a doctor asking about MY side effects, or if I had to report side effects to a doctor.

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Risperdal Diary Day 1

Took 0.5mg risperdal last night before bedtime. The doctor had said that it would make me feel drowsy and she sort of hoped that’d help me with sleep (which is strange, since sleeplessness is a possible side effect). Well, it didn’t help with sleeping, but it did make me feel more quiet. Consequently, while I did not sleep more, I feel it had a good effect anyway.

In any case, it’s now 10:15 AM (took the med around midnight) and I do feel more dull than usual. This was in one way a desired effect, but I do have some more physical tiredness than usual and this is annoying, though not worrysome. Also, I’m really curious what effect this med will have tomorrow, when I’ll be doing O&M in Nijmegen. The way the doctor described it, the dulling from the med may in fact slightly decrease my response to stimuli, which is a good thing. I cannot yet determine whether it works, but this is obvious since meds don’t start working (except for the side effects that you didn’t want) till a few days into using them. However, dulling also means less alertness and possibly less reactivity, and I’m not sure how this is going to play out in traffic. We’ll see.

Called the prescribing doctor today. She’d asked me to do this to see how the risperdal affected me. Basically, she wanted to make sure I tolerated it and didn’t experience too many side effects. I explained about the dullness and clarified that the med didn’t help me sleep, and told her I couldn’t yet judge effectiveness appropriately. She recommended I do move up to 0.5mg twice daily and asked whether I already had a physician in Nijmegen. I don’t, but I explained about my contact with mental health Nijmegen. She said I should ask those folks to see if I can get to see a doctor about the risperdal, but of course I’ll not have an appointment there till August 21 and she prescribed the risperdal for two weeks. So she told me to call her back next week Thursday to see if she could write a new prescription and fax it to a drug store in Nijmegen.

Took the afternoon dose of 0.5mg about an hour ago (it’s now 1:30 PM). Have less of the dulling than I had last night, or notice it less. This side effect is something you can get used to, but this obviously doesn’t happen when taking the med only twice. No other side effects.

A little past seven o’clock PM: eventually did become more tired than usual. However, now it’s more of the mental type of dullness than actual physical tiredness. Not pleasant, but not extremely bothersome either.

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If Your Doctor Prescribed a Neuroleptic, What Would You Do?

Neurodiversity is a philosophy, or, some might say, a religion. But like any philosophy or religion, there are practice implications of that philosophy. I just violated one of them this afternoon, which is the rule that you should never, ever let anything remotely close to a neuroleptic enter your or your child’s system. I had a doctor’s appointment at mental health today and came out with a prescription for 0.5mg risperdal to be started this evening and to see tomorrow if I need it twice daily.

I went in with quite a good idea of why I wanted meds, but little capacity to explain it. Depending on the doctor, this would likely lead, I feared, to either being prescribed the first med that came into the doctor’s mind just to silence my complaints, or to being told that meds can’t solve my problems. Well, I never said they could. This was one thing in which the doctor did much better than I’d expected. She actually asked about my symptoms and was probably as specific as she could be. I did not understand everythign she asked, but Marjan was with me and with her help, I was able to answer her questions quite well, and felt I actually explained the reason why I came into her office. At first, we focused on sleeping difficulties, which are an issue but not the most significant one in my current symptoms. She figured this out, apparently, as I described what happened at night when I can’t sleep, and what happens during the day. I did the latter with some help from Marjan. The doctor asked quite a few questions and hence got quite a good image of my situation.

She asked me about previous experiences with meds. The only time I ever took meds for psychological/psychiatric reasons, is last year with temazepam for sleeping difficulties. The temazepam, while only having taken it once every three or four nights, lost effectiveness very quickly. Besides, last year my symptoms were a lot better than this year and sleep stuff was more prominent (that is in fact the one and only thing that is better now than last year). The doctor got to summarize what she thought a med should do for me, and I agreed with it and meanwhile paged my inner medical encyclopedia to think out what med she might be thinking about. Marjan asked her (note to self: always remember to ask about this, cause some doctors have a habit of telling you only after they write the prescription) and she (doctor) said she was thinking about prescribing risperdal. Of course, my neurodiversity alarm went off big time, and in the process of thinking out whether I wanted to be a neurodiversity hypocrite and whether I wanted to believe the adult autistics on a Dutch forum (many of who voluntarily take risperdal) or those in APANA, I almost forgot to ask about the med’s effects. Marjan asked and the doctor did fairly well in explainign the desired effects – at least, I’ve seen autistic adults who take risperdal mention the same effects -, but extremely poorly on the side effects. Since I know all side effects, I did not have a problem with this, but it would be a problem for someone who hasn’t been involved with autistic advocacy for too long.

Marjan and I discussed amongst ourselves the stated effects of this med, and I chose to let the doctor prescribe it anyway. So I’m a neurodiversity hypocrite. Well, not when my own philosophy is concerned, but when I’m not so dull from the risperdal that I can’t write clearly anymore, I’ll discuss this tomorrow.

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