Hey there,

I read your blog every day and share your writing with my friends in Moodgarden.

This entry gets my Irish up. Antidepressants scare me...especially when used with bipolar disorder. In my opinion and I'm not alone in this opinion, AD's damage people with bipolar disorder by kindling...causing more rapid and more severe cycling over time.

It's criminal to give a depressed person antidepressants without doing a thorough family history. Patients with a family history of bipolar disorder shouldn't be given AD's without careful and attentive medical supervision. Many depressed people may have an underlying predisposition to bipolar disorder, but would never manifest it fully without a catalyst--such as the extreme stress of combat or the equivalent. AD's often bring on that first mania in these vulnerable individuals. As you know, along with a diagnosis of bipolar comes a lifetime of medication.

What about covering other treatments for depression besides antidepressants? I suffer from bipolar disorder, type 1, with seasonal affective disorder. I take a cocktail of mood stabilisers...a long list now (lithium, tegretal, trileptal) and a low dose of antipsychotic (seroquel) and thyroid hormone (synthroid). My doctor doesn't recommend AD's for patients like me. Chances of mania are too high.

He did recommend light therapy for my fall and winter seasonal depressions about 20+ years ago. Lightboxes may work for people with seasonal affective disorder. The antidepressant effects of light have never given out for me.

In the last few years, I also tried omega 3 fish oil capsules at my doctor's urging. On a mood scale of 1-10 with 1 being despair and 10 being mania, the omega 3 pull me up from a stable 5 to an exuberant 6 or 6.5 most days.

Talk therapy helps. Exercise helps even more.

With pills, there is the placebo effect...Hope is probably the most important thing we can give a depressed person. People place a lot of hope in pills.

Thank you for your fine coverage of all things moody.

Best wishes,
edge

On Prozac.I stood on top of the roof of a car in the rain screaming. Off of Prozac I'm not on the car roof screaming Im going to kill myself. I could hear the words come out of my mouth, was present enough to think oh holy shit, and started a slow titration off of it. My daughter ended up in her 1st psych hosp experience due to Luvox, the 2nd hosp experience due to zoloft...and dont forget other meds, with similar mechanism of action...Buspar also gave my daughter suicidal ideations. I'm not dx bipolar but it surrounds my family in various levels of axis///psychosis is what is attacking my daughter right now. I clearly react to these meds, the only one I can take so far for anxiety is xanax, and hell that has a side effect of anxiety. So what then?