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When I was a freshman in college, I overstressed myself through studying and bad sleep and eating habits. I had a manic episode (bipolar runs in my family) and was hospitalized for a few days. They put me on Abilify, which had just come on the market. I went back to college, thinking that I would be all right, as they had assured me. But after a few days of apparent stability, I started to get worse - not manic this time, but depressed. The medication was putting me into a kind of quiescent state where I never really felt awake and where I always looked exhausted, even though I was sleeping most of the time. When I slept, I had extremely troubling dreams in which I felt like I was constantly being tossed and turned. I was also losing control of my tongue, having increasingly violent facial tics. Eventually it got so bad that I had to go to the emergency room, where thankfully they realized what the psych ward doctors had missed: that the antibiotic I was taking for acne was using the same metabolic pathway as the Abilify, causing it to build up in my system.
I got off the Abilify, and I'd like to say that things got easy right after that, but they didn't. I actually became much more manic than I had been before. It took the doctors a few tries to find a medication that worked for me. Then they put me on Depakote and, in the five years since then, I haven't had any problems.
I suppose atypical antipsychotics shouldn't be banned from the market, as I'm sure they are the best drugs for some people, but their side effects are extremely unpredictable and it takes a few weeks to see how any particular individual is going to react to them. I think they're probably prescribed for too many things relative to the use for which they were initially developed. What scares me the most about your story is the tenacity with which the doctors held to their theories about what was wrong with your son, and their seeming blindness to the possibility that the new symptoms he was manifesting were caused by the medication rather than things which the medication needed to treat.
I'm glad you had the common sense not to listen to them - sometimes we defer excessively to doctors' judgment, forgetting that they too can be fallible, and no one can foresee all possibilities.
