The Crucial Nature of Abilification

So I enjoyed my first visit with the Los Angeles County psychiatrist who will be my rock as I navigate the shoals of time. She was at some pains to indicate that her function is to make a diagnosis and prescribe drugs, not to serve, even in the most casual fashion, as a therapist.

She asked me about symptoms, I responded, and she offered a truly dazzling variety of drugs, including several that I've tried in the past to either no effect or ones ranging from mildly negative to catastrophic, and several others I've never encountered in my fairly wide travels through the terrain.

She also informed me that she would under no circumstances prescribe alprazolam (generic Xanax) because it is addictive, which is true, but only if one uses it continually, at which point habituation renders it useless so what would be the point? Her preference for treating occasional anxiety is to prescribe one of several drugs that must be taken daily, forever, rather than prescribing something that can be taken only on those occasions when anxiety is present in force. She's French. C'est la vie.

Eventually she persuaded me—actually I allowed myself to be persuaded for reasons of my own—to try on one of the drugs with which I wasn't familiar. It's called 'Abilify', and it is an anti-psychotic drug originally developed to treat schizophrenia and now widely deployed in the battle against bipolar disorders.

'Abilify' sounds to me like one of those words which develop either on the street or in a Tony Robbins seminar. "What you got to do is abilify yourself, man. Abilification, you know what I'm saying? Unleash your skills upon the world." Abilify would be a verb. One shouldn't trust manufacturers who insist on naming products using inappropriate parts of speech.

Anyway, I accepted the samples and later that day, at what we euphemistically call bedtime, I ingested one. During the next eight hours, maybe two of which involved actual sleep, I experienced a panopoly of symptons that were either rare to my experience or totally beyond it, including wild dreams, linguistic mania, incoherence, uncontrollable restless movements, serious anxiety and several other symptoms that the drug was putatively designed to ease.

I awoke, to the extent that there was anything to awake from, feeling intensely irritable, irritated and, as the cherry on top, nauseous to the point that I thought I was going to throw up. Some of the symptoms persisted on and off throughout the day, but by nightfall I was more or less back to normal other than feeling the lack of sleep.

So I'm not going to abilificate any more, although I do plan to keep the drug around in the (sadly plausible) event an occasion arises when the various reactions to it might be of some use.