Has anyone else got or had medication induced akathisia?

I'm sensitive to drugs as well. I was put on 1/4 tablet of citalopram for two weeks all it did was make me sleep for 15 hours a day. Doctor said I didn't need it as my body was producing sufficient serotonin. He prescribed instead  Melatonin 3mg which I take at 9 pm each night  to regulate my circadian sleeping pattern so I go into REM sleep.

Hello, my name is Gordon. The doctors and medical community will lead you to believe that akasathia is rare, but as a paranoid schizophrenic I can personaly say this is untrue. I've tried all anti psychotic medications and they all gave me akasathia. It's a well known side effect.. It's actually the main reason mental health patients refuse to take medicines. The longest I had the condition was 1 year. Every waking moment was he'll.. Paced around my kitchen in circles all day. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sit. And on top of it all was the aggression. I couldn't explain what was wrong i told my doctor and he denied it was the medicines. It wasn't until I was hospitalized with psychosis that I was diagnosed. The hospital pyschiatrist seen me pacing back and forward and diagnosed me with akasathia. I stopped all medicines and the condition disappeared.

I have both dyskinesia and akathesia. Like you I am very sensitive to medications and am now on very little. This week has been tough as I feel like I am crawling in my skin. I have had little success in finding ways to cope with the effects of the symptoms. I keep myself busy as much as possible but symptoms take over when I stop. Dyskinesia involves the upper extremities whereas akathesia involves the entire body. My condition is worsening despite being off the meds that triggered the akathesia. I have told myself to eliminate the word " can't" as I find it more difficult when I say I can't go through anymore. Despite the symptoms do your best to remain positive or use positive words even though you don't feel it. This is no small task.

I don't know if my message got through.  So I'll try again.  I had akathesia in 1988 as a result of Haldol prescribed by my psychiatrist.  He apparently thought I was lapsing into schizophrenia, but I'd only seen him on two occasions and it's not clear why he jumped to that conclusion so quickly.  The Haldol was prescribed in November of 1987, and prior to that I'd never taken psych meds before.  When I visited the psychiatrist I had been feeling stressed out at work and was very unhappy.  I was melancholy.  I have a dark personality, and have always been prone to melancholy and nostalgia.  I'm crazy about Ingmar Bergman films, and at an early age I liked the sad poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, an American poet of the early 20th Century.  So I was unhappy, but unhappiness is my specialty.  But after taking the Haldol the psychological pain I experienced was unbearable and I had to go to the hospital.  I paced the halls of the hospital and wore out the carpet, so to speak.  My acute, PTSD-like anxiety continued to be very high for the first week.  The psychiatrist must have realized his mistake in prescribing Haldol when I was not psychotic.  So Haldol, which is designed to treat psychosis, actually made my condition far worse than it was when I showed up in the office of the psychiatrist.  The psychiatrist switched from Haldol to Mellaril, a drug of the same class which doesn't have the side-effect of akathisia.  Then to reduce the anxiety he'd caused by prescribing Haldol, he gave me Xanax, a dangerous, addictive drug not recommended for long-term use.  But Xanax only served to deaden the psychological pain.  I was never the same after that time.  Almost 30 years after taking the Haldol I still have periodic episodes of PTSD-like anxiety, usually when there are stressful events in my life.  Like I said earlier the psychiatrist only saw me twice before prescribing Haldol.  He didn't know a damn thing about my condition.  I was born with a developmental disorder like attention deficit.  I had a terrible childhood with harsh and critical parents, bullies and social rejection.  I had a high IQ and showed strengths in things like history, philosophy, foreign languages, art and music, but my parents never stopped trying to turn me into someone I wasn't.  Society condemns brilliant historians and linguists because they're not mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, engineers, lawyers and all that other rot.  The elementary school psychologist said I had problems in a 1967 report that my parents received.  My parents could have told the psychiatrist about this but they didn't.  I don't think I ever got over the Haldol, and my attention deficit and high IQ weren't know until it was too late to do any good.  It's not always a good thing to be intelligent or have a high IQ.  In fact in American society, which has a long history of anti-intellectualism, it is frowned upon to "think too much."  I'm 54 years old and it seems like I never had a chance to get ahead in life, and I'm very bitter about that.  I've had dull badly-paying jobs in various types of industrial hell, when I would have wanted to work in an academic setting.  I still have to live in a society where ignorance is a point of honor, and "book learning" is for fools.       

I can categorically state that, yes, I have. In my first case, tricyclic antidepressants (in particular Endep - amitriptyline) was (yet to be determined to be) the cause. Read on for elaboration. The only treatment that worked to a degree for me was Valium. I suspected that amitriptyline was a strong factor (my doctor dismissed this!), I tapered off it on my own. It took 3 months to go from 100mg to zero by cutting off a piece of each tablet until down to a mere sliver. My RLS and restlessness finally subsided.

Now, being that the cause was not (yet) medically determined and that this was the very first time I was diagnosed with this horrible malady, it was to happen one more time. In the 2nd instance, I became severely clinically depressed after witnessing the twin towers collapse from only a few blocks away. I was then prescribed Effexor. Guess what? Within 2 weeks, my RLS and even worse restlessness returned with a vengeance. It was only then that I needed to remind my GP of the 1st instance and how I dealt with it. He looked at my history and again prescribed Valium 5mg twice per day plus a quick taper off of Effexor. This 'relapse' took nearly a year to subside, with the added problem of tapering off Valium! 

I've been free of all antidepressants and benzodiazepines for 18 months now. I don't get restless legs or awful anxiety (internal restlessness) any more. I will never, ever take antidepressants again. I consider myself fortunate to not have developed a permanent form of akathisia. There are many others out there not so fortunate.

Thank you to everyone posting here. You've helped me solve a mystery. Because I wasn't aware that there really was something called akathesia and that it might occur during tapering off psychiatric meds, I didn't connect what was going on when it started and usually occurred at night. I knew of Restless Leg Syndrome, and wondered if something like that could occur throughout your body. I have creepy crawly feelings inside my body and am feeling compelled to move around. I can’t fall asleep, because I keep needing to move. I’m going nuts! 

For a few years I had been taking Risperdol, Effexor, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Valium, and sleep meds to treat bipolar depression. My current psychiatrist is helping me taper off several meds. I did not experience akathesia while tapering or eliminating Risperdol, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Lexapro, or Effexor during the first few rounds, probably because I had so much other med in my system. The doc said with the latest big dosage cut of Effexor that I might have "anxiety". I don’t know what “anxiety” means to her, but this is not what I would describe as anxiety as I know it. I have been on the lowered dose of Effexor for 3 weeks and started to experience akathesia after 2 weeks. I hope this will not continue for long.

When I started  feeling weird and restless, I began researching to see what might be causing it. I thought it might be connected to spinal problems. Frankly it actually could be related to that too, but then I remembered the doc’s comment about  anxiety in reference to tapering my med. I also remembered  experiencing this in the past when I had tried Abilify, so I thought it might be related to the meds. With Abilify, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I marched in place and ran laps around my kitchen island and couldn't sit still. I stopped taking it after about a week and the symptoms went away.

I did not experience akathisia with antipsychotics other than Abilify or when tapering off them but did develop dyskinesias while using almost all of them. Those experiences were awful.