Hi, thanks for the site, great to be here.

I will say more and introduce myself properly but first I need to ask a question.

I've just read something on here that's freaked me out.

I weigh and measure each of my mirtazapine pills individually but I think I've just read somewhere here that that's not the way to get the most accurate weight.

I really struggle to understand the maths and methodology but does the varying filler weight mean it's better to take an average weight?

That's the impression I get from what I read.

If someone could explain this as though I were a complete simpleton, or even just tell me what to do I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks 😊

Hi, just following up my previous post so I can get approval and hopefully get an answer to my question.

I'm freaking out here thinking I've been doing this wrong and messing my brain up (more) for 4 years. Jeez !

Welcome to the forum!

 

This is a volunteer-run, community forum aimed at helping those who are tapering and/or experiencing difficulties with psychiatric medications and withdrawal syndrome. We are not medical professionals and cannot offer medical advice. We simply offer support and opinions which you could use as talking points with a medical provider knowledgeable in withdrawing off psychiatric medications.

 

Please familiarize yourself with the forum rules and the disclaimer located here: Guidelines

Regarding knowing which weight to aim towards, you want to take the average weight of 10 tablets, divide them by the dosage and then multiply by the dose you want to take:

(average tablet weight)/(tablet dose)*(wanted dose)=(wanted weight)

that will give you the tablet weight you should aim towards.

That way you get the maximum consistency possible in the simplest way. You should just use the average tablet weight to calculate which weight to aim towards, even if one tablet is a bit heavier than the other. each tablet can have +-5% of the marked dose when manufactured.

if you want to calculate what dose you are taking currently, you want to do the following:

(weight of tablet you are aiming towards)/(average tablet weight)*(tablet dose)=(the dose you are taking)

Please make sure your signature is kept up to date with your drug history. This will allow members to see some basic information about your drug history and situation so that they may help you best. Currently you haven't added all details regarding your drug history, if you could add the information for all the drugs you ever took, that would be helpful. Information on how to do this is located in the FAQs section above, but here is a direct link: Update Signature

 

In the mean time this is what I would do if I were you:

 

-Stay Hydrated 

 

-Eat a good clean whole food diet, avoiding processed foods and sugars.

 

-Stay away from caffeine, alcohol and antihistamines and any other psychoactive substances.

 

Supplements are to be avoided initially, as they often irritate our nervous systems. Try to get your nutrition through food.

 

Down the line, you may wish to introduce Fish Oil and Magnesium. Those who can tolerate them have found them calming to the nervous system. Be careful try one at a time and start low and see how you get on should you choose to try them.

 

A daily walk is very important as much as you can manage, if you can manage it. Gets you your fresh air and Vitamin D does wonders for your mind!

If you have any more questions let me know.

 

Edited July 11Jul 11 by Lighty

freaking out wouldn't benefit you, even if you calculated your weight using a random tablet weight, it wouldn't be that off, just +-5% off max the dose you thought you were taking, you will be fine and you will heal, your body always strives towards health and does it's best.

Welcome to the forum

As Lighty has said; please don't worry too much about your technique for calculating your dose. If you think about it, when you are not tapering and just taking one pill each day you naturally get a fluctuating amount of powder anyway, reducing each pill by the % is kinda fine from that perspective.

It is advised to work off an average pill weight though, so I would just establish that and stick to it going forward. You don't need to recalulate between batches, just hold your dose for a couple of weeks when you change batch to be safe, so treat it like a cut.

You certainly have not been messing your brain up so nothing to fear. :)

Chippy

Welcome to the forum.

What tapering method are you following? Have you been having issues or significant symptoms ramping up after reducing doses?

Thanks all.

I'm really sorry but my brain melts when I try to understand this. Is my method of weighing every pill to the dose I want less accurate than taking an average? I thought the way I was doing it would give me the most accurate dose but reading today, I got the hazy impression that that's not the case. Reading between the lines of what you're saying Lightly, it's the other way round?

I really appreciate your answer, and thank you Chippy, for the reassurance but could you possibly explain it, I'd really like to understand.

Is it because the amount of filler varies? It's astonishing how difficult it is to try to make sense of it.

Luke, I did most of the reduction between 2020- 2022 in a pretty ad hoc random way. I started with a 50% reduction, I knew no better, and felt so wrong I held for a year. (I did try to reduce further during that year, again pretty randomly but things got bad fast so I went back up) Then I reduced to 5.3 over a year, again randomly. I was getting symptoms but was kinda coping but then I took amoxicillan and really messed myself up. I started reacting to all sorts of foods, meds, supplements, toiletries so I held for 2.5 years.

Since then, over the last year I've reduced by 10% in tiny drops, 0.1, 0.1, 0.05, 0.05, 0.01, 0.15, 0.02, 0.02. I think that comes to about 10%.

I mainly wanted to get below 5, somehow, psychologically, that was important to me and then the 0.15 drop I did because I stopped smoking so I thought I might get away with it as I'd been told stopping smoking makes AD'S more effective. Also because I didn't want more effective. I didn't dare do more because I'm still dyregulated.

I don't plan to drop more, much as I itch to, until I'm more...resilient? Stable?

I started eating meat over the last year, and that, along with stopping smoking (I still use a nicorette inhalator - I'm reducing) seems to have brought on massive improvement although it could also just be the 3 year turning point you've talked about.

I'm seeing a functional doctor on Tuesday. I've wanted to see someone for a long time but didn't know who would be appropriate and also it seemed pointless as I couldn't take supplements but I'm hoping now for some answers to the reactivity. I don't think I'm experiencing withdrawal symptoms, except very mild ones after these recent drops, I just seem to be dyregulated in that I react to things I would have tolerated before, suntan lotion! Toothpaste!

I hope to continue to improve, hopefully faster with input from this doctor, although I don't expect her to have a magic wand, and then in time I'd like to taper, in a sensible fashion. I realise what I've done so far was pretty inadvisable.

Thanks again, everyone, so much, for all your responses, and I really appreciate how quickly you've responded.

And thank you for the warm welcome, it means so much. It's been a very lonely, scary time 🙏

Chippy, what do you mean by batch?

5 hours ago, Chippy said:

advised to work off an average pill weight though, so I would just establish that and stick to it going forward. You don't need to recalulate between batches.

You don't have to reweigh and get a new average off each new pill bottle or batch. Just do the average once and you are good to go.

I am tapering paroxetine...the average pill weight for a 20 mg pill is 236.8 so if I needed 10mg it would be 118.4 mg, 5 mg is 59.2mg and my dose of 3.85 mg is 45.6 mg.

This average remains the same as long as you use the same manufacturer and the same size pill.

Hope that makes sense.

That is a good plan. Getting your average and moving forward might cause a little bump but just stick to that....run your numbers by us if you need help.

It is but thousands have been successful...hold on to that. ❤️🙏

Thanks LIC, yes, that makes sense.

What I still don't understand is if taking an average is actually more accurate than weighing each pill to the desired dose. If it is, I'd really like to understand why?

This is how they are made: the drug is mixed with filler on a huge scale...for thousands of pills. The mixture is pressed into molds, then they are sprayed with a coating. It is all automated. So each pill can vary by small amounts in weight. But the weight determines the amount of drug because it is the ratio of drug to filler that is consistent.

If the pills had a specific amount of drug injected into a mold that would be a different story but that is not how they are made.

So if one pill weighs more it means there is more drug and filler but the ratio of drug to filler stays consistent. So a pill weighing 100 mg has more drug than a pill weighing 50 mg...but since the ratio is the same the individual weight is irrelevant. If I always use 45.6 mg of paroxetine, I will always get 3.85 mg of drug.

The government allows for a small % of variance because it is impossible for each mold to deliver a perfect equal sized pill.

Hope that makes sense.

you may want to familiarise yourself with some of the tapering methods various people have employed:

General tapering information, probably good to read this first as it contains a lot of helpful explanations:

Tapering Information - Tapering - The Antidepressant Harm and Recovery Forum

How to prepare doses, something you've been asking about:

Preparing Doses for Tapering - Weighing & DIY Liquids - Tapering - The Antidepressant Harm and Recovery Forum

Cutting calculator, which helps with the above:

Cutting Calculator 2.0 - Tapering - The Antidepressant Harm and Recovery Forum

Post on micro tapering, which is an alternative method some people use when they find the 10% drops difficult to tolerate:

Micro Tapering - Tapering - The Antidepressant Harm and Recovery Forum

The "brass monkey slide", a different form of micro tapering employed by an old SA user "brass monkey" to successfully taper when other methods weren't very tolerable:

The Brassmonkey Slide Method of Micro-tapering - Tapering - Surviving Antidepressants

You may wish to consider whether a micro tapering method would be potentially more tolerable for you. Having said that, I think the first steps are:

1. Hold your dose and stabilise a bit, as you said

2. Whatever further tapering you do do needs to not be random, it should be a bit more planned

If it's planned out a bit more, you can always slow down, but there's a structure in place that you can follow so you're not making rash decisions and destabilising yourself.

Hi, panic over. I'm fine thanks.

Going back to the discussion about weighing pills.

I get that it's advised to take an average pill weight. But having thought it through, I'm pretty sure this is because using the weight of just one pill could lead to inaccurate doses, or less accurate. But actually weighing each pill individually has, to my thinking got to be more accurate.

What I'm saying is, it's better to take an average of ten than just go off one pills weight, but it would be more accurate still to weight each one.

It's a sad testament to the rabbit hole that I find this quite interesting and I'd be interested to know what you guys think.

Have you familiarized yourself with this? Thanks.

10 hours ago, Reboot said:

What I'm saying is, it's better to take an average of ten than just go off one pills weight, but it would be more accurate still to weight each one.

It is more accurate to weigh 10 pills and then use that average weight then it is to weigh each one. Each pill has the same proportion of drug to filler ratio but each pill varies in weight due to manufacturing tolerances so the dose of each pill varies naturally. Finding an average weight and taking that each day is more accurate as a result. Hope that helps and makes sense.

Thanks LIC and Chippy.

I'm struggling to get my head round this. I'm no scientist and I've never been good at maths but it was precisely because each pill weight varies that I thought it would be more accurate to weigh each one individually and take the desired amount.

I think the average idea was originally advised as better than assuming all pills are of equal weight, not as superior to weighing each pill, and has been adopted as just best practice when in fact, individual weighing provides more accuracy.

It seems chat gtp, which is not infallible, agrees.

I seem to remember reading a post on SA where the poster said they were going to weigh each pill individually because they had time and wanted to maximise accuracy.

Please forgive me going on about this. Because I struggle with maths, well, and just about everything else, I've really given this some thought and I'm curious to get to the bottom of it, also I want to be as accurate as possible and I'm thinking maybe other people might want to too, at least knowing for sure would give people the option.

I can't upload the page from gtp, it's too large. Basically it says:

"The batch average is useful if you don't know the weight of the individual tablet or don't want to weigh every tablet.

Once you've weighed the individual tablet accurately replacing its measured weight with the average discards information and cannot improve the estimate, unless the measurement itself is noisier than the tablet to tablet variation."

This last bit is perhaps very relevant. If the scales aren't very accurate then an average might make sense, but using a scientific balance or another scale that gave really accurate readings would mean weighing individually would be more accurate.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by Reboot

49 minutes ago, Reboot said:

thought it would be more accurate to weigh each one individually and take the desired amount.

If I am reading this correctly, I think you are getting confused as to what we are saying.

The average is only done once to find your starting weight. Once you have that weight, you weigh each pill individually and shave the individual pill to the needed dose.

For example....10 pills of my paroxetine weigh 2368 mg...those pills being 20 mg of actual drug each. So one pills average weight is 236.8 mg. I am not taking 20 mg but 3.85 mg. So I cut each 20 mg pill in 4. Then take one piece and shave it down to 45.6 mg to get a 3.85 mg dose.

So you need to tell us how much 10 pills weigh and what is the dose of the pill. Then tell us what dose you are at and we can tell you how much your current dose will weigh moving forward.

Edited July 19Jul 19 by LostinCanada

Also your signature is not clear.

It needs to clearly state the drug... starting date, dates of dose drops with specific dosages. Thanks. ❤️🙏

Hey @Reboot I have nothing to add to what @LostinCanada has said. Essentially average weights are more accurate than deducting from each pill, so much so that you would be better off even if you were taking a full dose to weigh it and not just take the full pill, but obviously most don't. Also if you start to make a liquid from your pill, weighing the tablet or powder you add to the solution is more accurate than just using a whole pill.