prednisone psychosis???? help

Oh Hondo, bless your heart.....

 

You are SO NORMAL.  Prednisone, or other steroids at that dose will make you a raging wild beast.  I've been through it, and still have my moments.  It's an incredibly powerful medication that mimicks our own "fight and flight" hormone - adrenalin.  You probably know that, but thought I'd mention it.....

 

It's hard to control our emotions, rage, fear, anxiety, etc, when taking prednisone or steroids.  REALLY hard.  You're fine. It's the drug. It could also be the lupus. It plays with our body chemistry too.  But from your description of what happened, and the dose of pred you're on, dollars to donuts it's from the steroids.  The paranoia you had about the "non" people in your room - it's the mix of steroids you're on.  Prednisone itself can cause paranoia.

 

I had a melt down last night where I cried like a 3 year old boy (no offense to any 3 year old boys here!) (wink wink).  It was so stupid.  I had been working for 6 hours on my computer doing something that should have only taken 40 minutes.  My computer kept crashing (dang Photoshop software).  Well, I lost it. Plain and simple, had a total bawl fest and screamed obsenities at this computer. Clearly, a prednisone induced temper tantrum.

 

Tell your doctor.  Maybe they can speed up the taper for you.  What is your tapering schedule?  Anyhoo, you're okay.  What happened is normal when you're on that much pred/enocort.

 

Blessings!

Ginny

 

This is probably my biggest complaint with prednisone- ie feeling like I have pms times 8 million and blowing up at everything. Please make sure you take stock of your moods and I have become suicidal for no apparent reason on a dose of 15mg. What has worked for me is lexapro. Thanks to work done by OBGYNs re: antidepressants and pms/mood disturbances etc, it has been found that you can take antidepressants for a short period of time and they can help stabilize your moods. For me, if I am on a higher dose of prednisone I am given sample packs of lexapro and I increase my dose for 5 or so days and usually that is enough to level me out.

Best of luck!
sharky

Hondo==
So sorry about you going through this. I have polyglandular dysfuction (meaing my whole endocrine system is trashed). Anyway, once I got prednisone and cortisone close together and they didn't mix well at all and I had really bad psychosis, ears ringing and really scary freaked out stuff where I was talking myself down constantly. I told my rheumie and he made a note. It creeped up on me so you might want to talk to them about the combination. I usually take 20mg of pred but with cortisone, it's probably going to behave differently.

You don't need to suffer like that. Hopefully, they can figure out something. I would think they can alter one of the two and make a note that this might happen.

I so feel for you. Right now I'm on Isoniazid for latent TB and am having bad reactions and craziness to it. Also, my thyroid has chosen this time to die some more, so my syntrhoid needs to be adjusted.

When I stop this, then I get my regular steroids, whatever they will be.

Hope you feel better soon and you can always go by what my mom used to say to us kids, you probably did something to deserve it! Not that mom was real well balanced, but she was untreated for my entire childhood and not a happy camper.

Take care and (((hugs)))