The woman has only been off the meds for a couple of weeks. Hardly enough time to make any conclusions about whether she needed them. People with BP do this all the time and then have real problems. She is right to try and I hope she is right, I really do, but it is too early to be crowing about success.

I feel terrible for both of these women. Clearly they had doctors with the fatal combination of incompetence and lack of empathy.

That said, my prescription to Zoloft was one of the ways I was diagnosed as bipolar 2. For months, I didn't have any kind of "adverse reaction" to sertraline except feeling (and acting a bit) like a rock star.

Then I crashed. Into a suicide attempt.

I'd love to now be diagnosed as not having bipolar, but somehow I don't think that's the case ...

this is a story I hear again and again and again...

I've met people who drink the kool-aid of this type of dx and end up on drugs for years and I've also meet numerous people now who figured it out and recognized it was the drug and didn't get sucked in and are doing just fine...

I feel that my experience is similar in that my "mania" was drug induced as well...by an illicit drug, but the same principal holds. I'd NEVER been manic before...unfortunately I did drink the kool-aid ended up on drugs for decades and now only in retrospect see the crime that was perpetrated against me.

I've never been manic without an external chemical trigger in my life. And now I've been off all mood-stabilizers and neuroleptics for several months and so far so good...nothing wrong with my noggin...can't say my poor body faired so well with the drug toxicity.

These are sad stories about reactions to SSRIs and these are the kind of stories which the Prozac Survivors Support Group heard during their
work on the issue from 1991 until 2001.

Anxiety and depression can be helped without using antidepressants. To do so ups a persons risk of being diagnosed as bipolar.

I have a friend in Iowa who said she suffered from social phobia but did not take antidepressants for it because her sister had taken Prozac for stress and gone batty on it. This friend in Iowa contacted this institute in Arizon which provided her [for a fee!] with books and tapes on social phobia. She ordered the materials and practiced with them faithfully and was able to overcome most of her social anxieties - to the point where she joined several women's groups in her town and began playing bridge.

Here is the information on that Institue. Also,following the info on the Institue, I have included the first part of the posting which appears on ssristories.com about the Duke study on exercise and depression. I hope this can give some help. Part of the agoraphobia, of course, is being caused by the withdrawal.

http://www.socialanxietyinstitute.org/

An International Outreach to
People with Social Anxiety Disorder

Social Anxiety Disorder (formerly called social phobia) is the
largest anxiety disorder, and the third largest mental health care problem in the world today.

The Social Anxiety Institute helps people with social anxiety recover...and move forward with life. Social anxiety is a fully
treatable condition and CAN be overcome. Active, structured cognitive-behavioral groups have been in progress since 1994.

If you live out of area, the audio therapy series is recommended. It has been designed especially to help you overcome social anxiety wherever you live. This program is a cognitive audio series that contains direct, explicit therapy in how to overcome social anxiety.

NEW VIDEOS: Max, Chris , Julie, James , Mike, and Zeke Talk about Overcoming Social Anxiety
What is Social Anxiety? | Therapy Programs at The Social Anxiety Institute | Find out more about Social Anxiety
Social Anxiety Bookstore | Social Anxiety Institute Mailing List
The award-winning audio therapy series: "Overcoming Social Anxiety: Step By Step"
Help and Support Pages for "Overcoming Social Anxiety" | Experiences in Overcoming Social Anxiety

©Copyright 2009, 1996, The Social Anxiety Institute, Inc.
Thomas A. Richards, Ph.D., Director

--------------------------------------------------

http://www.ssristories.com/show.php?item=1841

Paragraph 3 reads: "The new study, which followed the same participants for an additional six months, found that patients who continued to exercise after completing the initial trial were much less likely to see their depression return than the other patients. Only 8 percent of patients in the exercise group had their depression return, while 38 percent of the drug-only group and 31 percent of the exercise-plus-drug group relapsed."

http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=119

Effect of Exercise on Reducing Major Depression Appears to be Long-Lasting
date : 9/21/2000
media contact : Richard Merritt , (919) 684-4148
merri006@mc.duke.edu
editor's note : Note to editors: This dispatch is accompanied by a sidebar on a new, follow-up trial: NEW TRIAL: Why Exercise is Effective Treatment For Depression.

DURHAM, N.C. - After demonstrating that 30 minutes of brisk exercise three times a week is just as effective as drug therapy in relieving the symptoms of major depression in the short term, Duke University Medical Center researchers have now shown that continued exercise greatly reduces the chances of the depression returning.

I had my first manic episode when going back on Zoloft for the second time. This led to the discovery that I had undiagnosed bipolar II disorder. From my symptoms, going back to childhood, I met almost every one of the criteria for BP2. If it hadn't been for the Zoloft, I may have never been diagnosed properly with BP2. Up to this point I had been treated multiple times throughout my life for depression using many different anti-depressants, which in hindsight greatly exacerbated my BP2.

she really needs to smoke some weed for that anxiety.

it always does the trick for me!

Philip, you get the best mail; thanks for sharing.

According to some prominent researchers (like Akiskal), a manic switch on an AD is a "classic" sign of bipolar disorder since according to their research claiming that only people with bipolar depression switch on AD's while unipolars do not. Maybe it is this advice that the doctors in this column are referring to? But I don't believe that this "evidence" is widely regarded since the infamous DSM does not count AD-induced mania as a symptom of bipolar. My question is how do you distinguished AD-induced akathisia from a manic episode? Do the two get clustered together? Instead of considering just a single manic/akathisia episode, maybe what a doctor should look for is AD-induced ultra-rapid cycling (rapidly alternating manias AND deep depressions even when on an AD) as a marker of possible bipolar disorder.

For the record, while not manic, I have been hypomanic several times while on a medication regimen excluding all SSRI-type drugs.

When I saw this post I initially thought the "she" Philip referred to was myself. Something so similar happened to me. Fortunately I eventually found a new doctor who wasn't willing to jump to the bp diagnosis on the basis of very little evidence.

The problem seems to be that people are ERRONEOUSLY diagnosed BP because of a manic or akathisia reaction to a AD. And this process of deduction seems to have been institutionalized because people who actually DO have bipolar disorder tend to react this way to ADs.

There needs to be a way to distinguish a bad reaction to the drugs, which as we know varies from person to person, from anxiety and from bipolar disorder. Where is the research into this?

ADs are stimulants. It's no surprise they hype up some of us. Peter Breggin has documented this ad nauseum in his books. But psychiatrists seem to want easy answers and slap BP on anyone who reacts badly to an AD. As if the drug is flawless, and the gauge against which to judge the person.

I am 16 years old and recently diagnosed bipolar. One doc said it was II, another said it was NOS, all over an aqrgument over whether or not I am manic or hypomanic. Seeing as the incident in question involved me calling a friend and saying I alone knew god's true plan for the world, the second doc thought manic. Either way I wound up with a mixed episode and II was ruled out. I think that bp 2 is just a big fad, and that the doc said I was hypomanic just to suit the dx.