I started taking Abilify / aripiprazole just about a week ago and have had some very annoying side effects. I searched on Reddit and found people with similar experiences, but didn't find anything on Lemmy. For the sake of building up content here, I thought I'd share.

My psychiatrist started me on 5 mg Abilify at bedtime. Within a couple days, I noticed these effects:

• I feel drowsy and fall asleep easily about 20 mins after taking it. It usually takes me 30-60 mins to fall asleep otherwise, or 90-120 mins on really bad nights, so it's been helpful in that regard.
• I consistently wake up about 3 h into the night. If I try to go back to sleep, I can only stay asleep for 30-60 mins at a time before I wake up again.
• Whenever I wake up, I have this strange strobe light effect in my peripheral vision for a moment.
• My mood improved somewhat, but that's been outweighed quite a bit by the insomnia.

Just to clarify, I haven't been diagnosed with bipolar per se, but rather a mood disorder not otherwise specified. I get ups and downs, but I bounce between depression and irritability/agitation. Never had a manic episode.

I'll also note that I started lamictal / lamotrigine at 150 mg twice a day at the same time I started Abilify, but I've been on increasing doses for months with none of these issues. I'm also on HRT but that's been going on for years.

Thankfully, my psychiatrist gave me the go-ahead to stop taking the Abilify. Hopefully the negative effects go away soon.

Er self-driving, i don't know how to make the rule joke it's my first day

Say I go to a restaurant and find a hair in my food. Are there any actual health risks?

Does it make a difference if I:

• Find it in the dish, remove it, and keep eating
• Take a bite, find it in my mouth, and remove it
• Ingest it

This was inspired by a recent news story about a certain authoritarian butthole cosplaying as a food service worker. I did try to look it up (er, search it up?), but the top hits were lengthy meandering articles, or totally off-topic stuff like foods to prevent hair loss. So naturally I gave up and opted to consult the hive mind instead.

I've been donating to the news site Vox for a while now, and all their content has so far been free. I felt kinda bad about blocking the ads on their site and fast-forwarding through all the ad breaks in their podcasts. So in the spirit of actually supporting something I like, I started chipping in a few bucks a month.

But recently, they've started putting some of their articles behind a paywall. Since I was already donating, I automatically have access. But for some reason, I feel like I don't wanna pay anymore. It's not like it costs me more, but there's just something about dontating to a free site vs paying for exclusive content that doesn't feel the same. Maybe cuz I'm not a fan of paywalls in general, so I don't want to support companies that implement them.

Does that make sense? What would you do? And if you're not a fan of Vox, maybe think of some other free service/content, like videos from a streamer or a software project or something.