Prozac & out of control behaviors

July 22, 2008

Hi everyone, I am mostly a lurker here, still not sure if we actually

fit in to this group. My daughter just turned 12 this past

week. She has down syndrome and has not officially been diagnosed

with autism but seems to have many characteristics. The

" professionals " we have seen to not believe she has autism. Anyways

after my umteenth sleepless night I am writing to you all in

desperation. Back in January we started having issues with her

refusing to go to school. She had missed alot of school prior to that

due to multiple medical issues. Anyways things got progressively

worse. We were taking her to school kicking and screaming which did

not work. She eventually started shutting down, isolating not wanting

to even communicate with us, refusing to leave the house, bathe. I

finally got her into a psychiatrist around March who started her on

Prozac for depression, anxiety, OCD. This psychiatrist was the only

one through medicaid and she does not have much experience with down

syndrome. We have gradually increased the Prozac and started to see

small improvements but still not what I considered optimul. Anyways

she agreed to increase her up to 80 mg. We left on a 3 week vacation

to visit family and things started to decline from there. She started

having 1 to 2 fits, tantrums per day, and also seemed very tired and

just not interested in doing anything. We were staying with my

parents and she just wanted to stay in the house and still not go

anywhere but didn't seem to know what to do with herself at times. At

that point I opted to drop the dose back down, it had been about a

week. Things did not improve, they just got worse. We took her to a

Six Flags (I know we probaly overstimmed her), she was horrible unless

she was on a rollercoaster. That night all hell broke loose. She

just escalated into a rage and could not calm down. She was attacking

me, hitting me, throwing things, until 3:30 in the morning. This has

now been the issue off and on since then. I have been lowering her

dose and she is presently on 20 mgs and we had another horrible night

last night. Does anyone have any thought on what could be going on.

The psychiatrist has talked about Zoloft and also trying a small does

of Abilify with the Prozac. She talked about these meds before all

this as an alternative if the Prozac didn't help. We have not seen

her since all this, we see her tommorrow. Any advise would be really

appreciated, she is disrupting the whole family, I don't know what to

do. Thanks, Vicki

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