Posted by Elizabeth on January 11, 2000, at 19:29:50
In reply to Re: Parnate "properties" :), posted by Scott L. Schofield on January 11, 2000, at 13:32:09
Hi Scott.
> I guess whether or not you were hypomanic must be a tough call. Would the word “excitability” apply at all? What was it about your experience that suggests that hypomania may have been involved rather than any other phenomenon?
Okay, so what was going on (when I took Paxil) was this: I got irritable in an "excitable" way, as you say. I tended to be less easy-going than usual, picking fights with people over relatively minor things and being generally defiant. I was also hypersexual, having fantasies about lots of different people who I was seeing day to day. (I was in control enough not to act on them, though!) I was no longer feeling tired, even though I was not sleeping.
> I’m probably asking too many questions, but I am interested to know what caused the serotonin syndrome and how it manifested. Can serotonin syndrome produce a manic-like state?
Hell yeah. In this case, it was a mixed episode with psychotic features (at some point I just blacked out and woke up in restraints feeling strangely serene and unbothered by said restraints).
> I was under the impression that bipolar depression tends to resemble atypical unipolar depression in most cases. The symptoms usually include psychomotor retardation, anergia, hyperphagia, and hypersomnia
I think it's the other way around: bipolar disorder is more common in atypical depression than in "typical" depression, but atypical features have not clearly been shown to be more common in bipolar depressions than unipolar ones.
> Do you treat a syndrome, or do you treat a biological entity? If the biology of a “unipolar with drug-induced mania” turns out to be quite similar to that of bipolar, but significantly different from “unipolar without mania”, I think the identification of the biological etiology would better serve to choose treatments.
Yeah, this is true, I suppose; I think it depends if the patient continues having manic episodes on ADs or if it's an isolated thing...is there a latent bipolar disorder that is expressed by the addition of ADs, or is it truly "drug-induced?" The latter seems to be true in my case, as it turns out.
> You know the rapid-cyclicity deal, as arbitrary as it may be, can be a good index for deciding how to attack the illness. Does your “episodic” course resemble rapid-cyclicity?
In what sense?
> > Sure. MAOIs work well for my depression…
>
> Another correlative fact.Correlative with...?
> > …but I also have what my pdoc describes as "ADD spectrum disorder" and that has been causing me a lot of trouble.
>
> ???What is the ??? ? :-)
> To describe this stuff as being nothing more than “irritating” shows that your sense of humor may still be intact.
Okay, the spontaneous hypertension was more than irritating. :-} The weight gain is just irritating, I'd say, though (so far anyway).
(Yeah, I think I've got a sense of humor somewhere.)
poster:Elizabeth
thread:17762
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000101/msgs/18744.html