Posted by med_empowered on January 10, 2007, at 16:00:20
In reply to Re: Bipolar II - it really sucks)blueberry)med emp, posted by linkadge on January 10, 2007, at 13:22:16
Jimmyboy--I hear you on the anxiety from even low doses of stims. A LOW dose of an AD might work; I read an article where a doc recommended 37.5mgs/day Effexor, or 1/2 the usual minimum therapeutic dose. BuSpar+Stims might help, but buspar is a bid/tid med and it kind of sucks for a lot of people so....
For Bipolar, Wellbutrin (and Edronax and Straterra) seem helpful; they're kind of stimulant-ish, and there's a lower risk of inducing mania. With BP II (which overlaps a lot w/ forms of unipolar depression docs used to recognize in the pre-Prozac years), I think you kind of have to see how you react. If stims helped, maybe add in a low-dose, clean, tolerable AD...my vote would be celexa/lexapro at tiny doses, or maybe sub-therapeutic amounts of cymbalta (like 20mgs or so). I imagine an ADD doc would be more familiar with this than mood-disorder focused docs. Since there's so much overlap between ADD and some forms of bipolar (mood lability, anxiety, sometimes OCD, periods of irritability, so on and so forth), you might want to see if treating your problem from more of a "complicated ADHD" standpoint is more productive than treating it as a less-severe form of BP I, which is what it seems your doc is doing now.
Good luck!
poster:med_empowered
thread:720616
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070107/msgs/721127.html