Antipsychotic Medications (Nursing)

00:01 Hi, welcome to our video series on CNS psych medication.

00:05 In this series, we're gonna look at antipsychotic medications.

00:09 Now, these are central nervous system medications that are used to treat a wide range of psychotic disorders.

00:16 Now, we use them in Schizophrenia -- that's their primary use.

00:19 We use antipsychotic medications in Schizophrenia.

00:22 Remember that's a mental health disorder where the patient has difficulty with reality, they have hallucinations, and delusions.

00:29 It's also used in Bipolar disorder during the manic phase.

00:33 Now, we use it in other delusional disorders, depressive psychoses, and some drug-induced psychoses.

00:39 So we use antipsychotic medications for several diagnosis.

00:43 You'll see it predominantly for patients with schizophrenia and possibly for patients with bipolar disorder in the manic phase.

00:50 Now the initial effects, you might see a small effect in a couple of days but it takes 2-4 weeks to really see a full effect and even up to months for the maximum therapeutic effect.

01:01 Antipsychotics in the elderly -- we've put this on an exclamation point slide because we wanna let you know that if an elderly person is suffering from a dementia-related psychoses, they should not receive an antipsychotic.

01:14 Now, I can tell from a personal story.

01:17 I had a family member in the hospital and somehow they were ordered an antipsychotic medication.

01:23 Do you know who stopped that medication from being given to my loved one? Yeah, it was a nurse right at the bedside.

01:31 She knew that that was not an appropriate medication for my father because in the elderly, this will increase the risk of mortality.

01:39 So I am forever grateful to that nurse who stopped my father from getting an antipsychotic.

01:46 Now, there's two groups to these medications.

01:50 Again, they're not very cleverly named.

01:52 First generation antipsychotics and second generation antipsychotics.

01:57 Well, the first generation were the ones that was discovered first; the second generation are ones that were discovered second.

02:03 Now, initially we found the second generation, we thought they were awesome. They're gonna be so much better than the first.

02:09 Well, turns out they're really not. They just have some different types of side effects.

02:13 First generation antipsychotics are also called conventional antipsychotics.

02:19 The second generation is also known as atypical antipsychotics.

02:23 Both groups are equally effective in treating the antipsychotic issues but they have some significant differences in side effects and I'll break those down for you. It is an important point though, you wanna have clear in your mind what are the differences between first generation and second generation.

02:42 The answer is the side effects and we're gonna walk you through those.