As to the following, I would appreciate your comments and observations:
I saw a new psychiatrist for the first time last week and he informed me that Seroquel (quetiapine) can cause high blood sugar, so he told me to get it checked.
Sure enough my glucose is 162 mg/dL ("probable diabetes mellitus") when it should be between 70 and 99.
There was nothing wrong with my blood sugar before I started taking Seroquel (although I do have a family history of diabetes and I'm about 50 pounds overweight, partly because of the Seroquel).
I was going to go to the laboratory this morning and have it checked again, to see if it might have been an anomaly or a mistake, but I've spoken with two friends who are psychiatrists as well as the one I'm seeing and none of them told me to redo the test, so maybe that's not necessary or useful.
My treating psychiatrist moved my next appointment closer from the beginning of September to August 15, because of the glucose result. He says there is another medication I can take that will reduce my glucose level and help me lose weight. I wonder if anyone on here knows what medication reduces glucose levels and appetite?
So, if I understand the process he's proposing, I'm going to take one medication for my mood, which medication hardly works, and then I'm going to take another so that the first medication doesn't cause permanent diabetes and all of the side effects and potential complications that come with diabetes?
That doesn't sound like it's worth it to me. It sounds like it would make more sense for me to take 200mg Seroquel before bed instead of 800mg per day, eat less because I'm taking less Seroquel, which would help me to lose weight and would help me to reduce my glucose level. Then, I might not need a second medication to reduce my glucose level.
One of friends who is a psychiatrist suggested that I not suddenly stop taking quetiapine if it has been stabilizing my mood. But it HASN'T been stabilizing my mood. In fact, I wrote a two page suicide note over the weekend (available for your perusal at the following link), so the Seroquel isn't helping me much.
https://www.moodtracker.com/fo... I'm going to reduce the amount of Seroquel I'm taking by 75% and see if that helps my blood sugar. It won't hurt it and I would prefer to preserve my fully functioning body rather than end up saddled with both mental and physical catastrophes.
I've been seeing a therapist, but I decided to stop seeing her. Although she promised me that she was a cognitive behavioral therapist, she has been asking me to find answers within myself for questions to which she believes she already knows the answer. She says I will benefit from the process of figuring out the answers myself. I KNOW she will benefit financially if it takes me two months to discover what she could have just told me in a moment.
I told this therapist that our discussions felt like an Easter Egg hunt or that children's game called "Hot Peas and Butter", in which someone knows the answer but only tells the people looking whether they are "getting warm" or "getting cold" as they search for an item whose location is already known to someone in the game.
I told this therapist that I want the kind of therapist who will tell me if my zipper is open rather than ask me how my day was while hoping I would eventually discover the open zipper through a series of Socratic questions.
So, I quit the therapy and I'm going to spend the saved money going to the beach and swimming, which will help me lose weight, which was one of my primary reasons for going to therapy in the first place.
It is very rare for me to get sick, but I had a slight pneumonia earlier this year. I never experienced anything like that before taking Seroquel. Now, I read that quetiapine can make a person more susceptible to pulmonary infections. I'm going to stop taking that feces in a pill. It might not be best for me to make these decisions on my own, against doctors orders, but this body and this brain are mine and I have a right to do with them as I please.
I'm not going to take a medicine that will give me diabetes and then take another medicine to bring down my blood sugar, as if I were a diabetic, which I might already be. Screw that. I'm just going to stop taking the medication that is driving up my weight and my blood sugar.
When I talk with the psychiatrist a week from now, we can discuss the whole picture and decide what to do globally.
If you have any knowledge or opinions about the above, I would appreciate hearing from you in the comments section below.
P.
Joined: 08-11-2012