Posted by Bipolarsux on January 28, 2003, at 4:14:12
I have had treatment resistant bipolar disorder with comorbid panic disorder for about 10 years.
Antidepressants and "mood stabilizers" aggravate the manic symptoms and I did not respond to lithium. Benzos in large doses do something to ease the mania but leave me emotionally flat and zombie like. Despite the fact they aggravate my mania, I still need to take antidepressants to fight off the other "pole" of the bipolar, so I am caught in a very tight medication "vice". Still the underlying illness regularly breaks through.
My manic symptoms tend to be severe agitation and insomnia, *severe* panic attacks and racing thoughts punctuated with feelings of elation and delusions of grandeur. Always my mania has been more difficult to control than depression (although this is often severe, too).
My pdoc is telling me that literally every reasonable combination of medication has been tried without much success over a long period of time and that we should start to think seriously about ECT, with maintenance ECT to follow if it works.
I am not afraid of the procedure itself or even the memory loss (you should try large doses of benzos and mood stabilizers if you really want to experience amnesia) but I am afraid it will not work. This is because I have read in a few places that ECT does not work on anxiety or panic, but these are major components of my mania.
When I asked my pdoc about this he replied that in his experience ECT works for a broad spectrum of bipolar symptoms but it is impossible to predict beforehand how any given individual will respond.
If there are people out there who have received ECT and part of their illness involved anxiety or panic attacks I would very much like to hear how these symptoms responded.
Hopefully there will be at least some positive responses :/
poster:Bipolarsux
thread:137894
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030125/msgs/137894.html