Posted , 5 users are following.
Hi
I have been on 2.5 mg of olanzapine for nearly 5 months. I want off it cos of weight gain. I am on other psychiatric meds. Can i just stop or do i need to taper ?
1 like, 18 replies
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maybefine sarah24378
Posted
I think if you're on other meds (so can take anything) you can quit Olanzapine. You might need to do a short 2 week taper. If you're on no other meds though, it's hard.
maybefine
Posted
If you wanna be safe tho, my formula is 2*how many months you've been on it. 5*2=10. 10 weeks of tapering would be advisable, you'd definitely be off it then.
sarah24378 maybefine
Posted
How would i taper from 2.5 mg ?
Just drop to 1.25 for 10 weeks ?
maybefine sarah24378
Posted
You could disolve the tablets in a beaker, stir it, pour out the difference. You could reduce the dose daily. You might need a milkshake on top, that stuff's bitter.
Or you could also get a pill cutter and cut by 1/8th every week.
sarah24378 maybefine
Posted
Did not know it was dissolvable in water.
maybefine sarah24378
Posted
Get one of these
oh I can't post images. If you Search "pill cutter"
they have a v that you can place a pill in and you can reliably orient the segments to cut smaller segments out of.
yeah also if you get the orodispersable versions of the pill you can dissolve them. If you've got a beaker with measuring guides you're sorted.
maybefine sarah24378
Posted
Sorry I got the formula mixed up. It's actually 2*years=months. Not weeks.
So you were on it for 5 months. = 5/12 year. So 2*5/12=10/12 Month.
That's 30 days * 5/6 = 25 days. Taper for 25 days. 3-4 weeks.
maybefine
Posted
Tapering is pretty obvious to me, but no one does it. You wanna get up to how much dosage makes you feel good. Take it for a week. Then calculate how long you'll be reducing for. Reduce daily by the division of the dose to the reduction span.
sarah24378 maybefine
Posted
2.5mg over 25 days is 0.1mg a day.
So it would be better for me to do this rather than drop to 1.25 mg for 25 days. I would need to get my psych to prescribe dissolvable pills for that to work. She already thinks im bonkers for insistingon slow tapers. She tells me to do really fast tapers and i refuse......i learnt the hard way. Im on quite alot of meds atm but what to get the last in out first.
maybefine sarah24378
Posted
Yeah. Like the first 2 weeks you'd be sleeping fine, the last week you would be on less and less. Almost nothing. The last day you'd be on 0.1 mg. if you sleep fine on that dau its like you took nothing. Let us know how it goes. If at any point in the process you can't sleep, go back to last night's dose. You'll need another calculation (start another 25 days from that point) for how to get from that dose to zero. If it drags on, at least you'll be sleeping the whole time. GL.
maybefine
Posted
maybefine
Posted
sarah24378 maybefine
Posted
maybefine sarah24378
Posted
DrNoIdea007 maybefine
Posted
I've gone to a compounding pharmacist who turned the Olanzapine into liquid - I used a syringe to get him to 0.10ml in the last 2 weeks. Unfortunately, 7 weeks after he stopped completely, he got some really bad withdrawal symptoms - all mentioned online - but the hospital he ended up in said he had relapsed and now he's back on it. Could not convince one Dr that he had no psychosis until the very first time he tried Seroquel - they said it was impossible. Let us know how you go.