Posted by headachequeen on March 15, 2004, at 18:55:50
In reply to Re: BiPolars not tolerating ADs? » katia, posted by Sooshi on March 15, 2004, at 15:48:41
> Katia - I could never tolerate Wellbutrin, because it always made me hypomanic, irritable...made me feel like I was sizzling like a piece of bacon!! I wish I could tolerate it, cuz I hear such good things about it, but I'm a BPer that just can't.....
I am not sure about this welbutrin thing at all... oh there is that thing word again.. so much for the educated individual... is that a topomax side effect? destruction of vocabulary???
I was on it for a while, I forget how long, for depression... first with another anti-depressant and I forget the name of it... was on it for AGES and when I switched doctors following my own doctor's retirement, the new doctor had changed me from a few months to a year-round dose, then decided to wean me from the old med, the name will return to me eventually, to welbutrin... and eventually to add effexor to it...
when I was diagnosed as epileptic he dropped the welbutrin in a hurry as it can cause seizures even in a non-epileptic so heaven knows what it would do to the epileptic...
the first thing my neuro asked was if the seizures had begun before or after welbutrin and when I told him that the seizures had been a part of my life for twenty years and more, he then decided he would take me on as a patient... furious at the doctor who would not send me for further examination because he had not wanted me to have to live with the stigma of epilepsy...
for that matter he was not excited at my having to live with the stigma of depression either...
HEY!!! I do not have leprosy...
I am an epileptic and I suffer from bouts of depression... don't have two heads, and my skin is not green and I do not eat children... and have yet to do anything that relegates me to the category of the truly bizarre -- don't belong in a Stephen King film, honest, so why do I have to worry about the {stigma}????
oh well, I am supposed to have come past that argument and rant. sorry...
At any rate, the Luvox was supplanted by the Welbutrin... here, it comes with little happy faces on the tablets... oh it is the trademark, I know, but it is in the shape of a happy face... talk about insult to injury!
I don't think the Welbutrin made any change in my approach to life (unless the sudden upswing in seizures of course...)... I still had my creative highs and lows... when work went well I still soared higher than the clouds and talked with angels on a face to face level... when work was not going so well I I did not soar...
when the me-induced high ended, I crashed with an outrageous bang.. you probably felt the crash wherever you may be and thought it was a minor earthquake...
my crashes and highs were all caused by me and my reactions to what I was accomplishing...
or to the aftermath of the accomplishment... despite the efforts of Welbutrin to control the highs...
after all, when one reaches the top of Everest, one has to fall to the bottom again... or as me old dad was so fond of saying, 'After the Lord Mayor's show comes the dustbin'...
then the effexor was added to it...all it really did was subdue my feelings and emotions... I don't think it helped in anyway at all or changed anything in a positive sense... I was simply subdues and took no joy in my work and approached my work with no real zeal or drive...
the doctors could not understand that the drive and excitement was me, not a psychosis or whatever... they were determined that I was driven by some sort of manic-depressive personality and could not understand that I was doing the driving and that without that drive, I was no one...
I am ADD and I guess, now that I understand it better, I am to some extent, maybe a large extent, hypomanic, but no I am not BiPolar, and their drugs were simply destroying the person I really was...
then they added the zyprexa and that was a real lark...Zombie-land... the waking dead...I think the welbutrin was preferable to those two...
my sister-in-law is presently on welbutrin and has been told that she must not have alcohol... well, she is an alcoholic, whether she wants to face it or not; not a fall down drunk, but a person who has to have a few beers a day or she cannot go on with her life alcoholic...
she has quit taking topomax for that reason, despite the fact that it controlled the seizures and tics that she has developed thanks to a broken spinal column, because she cannot drink any alcohol and take topomax...
she is also the one who warned me about alcohol and topomax... she learned the hard way...
she finds that welbutrin and alcohol don't go well together other than in low doses, so she has changed her dose to a lower one than that prescribed...
other than that it does not seem to cause any problems...
and I keep pumping her for information as she seems to have been on most of the meds that are mentioned here ...
never know when it might be a helpful bit of info for someone...
kat
poster:headachequeen
thread:50878
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040313/msgs/324735.html