mixed states
New cocktail
After a period of mostly funny (except when racing thoughts outpaced myself, rendering me semi-catatonic) hypomania, I sunk into a mixed episode with marked strong dysthimic moments — to the point I couldn’t get out of bed from depression this wednesday.
I think this stems from my shrink wanting to wean me off of Seroquel (I had been so stable on Seroquel and lamotrigine for so long), starting rippling waves even after I resumed my normal doses of Seroquel. Still, his project is to wean me off the anticonvulsants this time, substituting them for more Seroquel and more Ritalin (I take the long-acting version for actual ADD, not as a pick-me-up pill) to compensate for the extra sedative effects.
The extra Ritalin has also an emergency antidepressant function here. Higher doses of Seroquel are supposed to kick in with an antidepressant effect, but my functioning was way too impaired by the severe dysthimic micro-episodes I was getting at random points of time. All in all, while I’m worried about the possible “flattening” effects of getting too far with Seroquel (we’re dosing it up 50mg at a time), the extra Ritalin did give me an extra kick while not giving me the full hypomania (racing thoughts, etc.) effect. At least not yet.
Breadcrumb trails:
10mg, Anticonvulsant, Anticonvulsants, Antidepressant, Antidepressant Effect, Clonazepam, Cocktail, depression, drugs, Heck, Hypomania, Lamictal, Lamotrigine, mixed states, Mom, Norm, racing thoughts, Ritalin, Ritalin LA, Sedative, Seroque, Seroquel, Stems, ultradian cyclingMore stuff [Psychopharmacological geekery, my diagnosis, Mixed States]
These mayonnaise posts might be annoying from the point of view of the reader and sure hurt my googleability and reader attention, but there’s so much context involved in most post and it’s kinda tiresome introducing it as-needed, not to mention forcing anyone who really wants to understand this story to decipher through the breadcrumb trails scattered over short-ish, this-is-now posts.
My psychiatrist. My psychiatrist is a psychopharmacology geek who has studied under who he consider his Master, a psychopharmacology geek from Spain. I mean, he went all the way through med school, but he still holds a special place to this Master.
What being a psychopharmacology geek means is that we’ve gone through a lot of meds trying to optimize my experience. Most psychiatrists will give you lithium or Depakote and expect you to cope — actually bullying you into coping and keep taking your meds — and while that does work wonders, statistically — as in preventing relapse for N weeks, where N is a function of the size of your research grant, I for one know that I would have lost a lot in life if I had been in Depakote monotherapy, even if that meant avoiding a few hypomanic flip-outs.
Breadcrumb trails:
agitated depression, Borderline Personality, Clonazepam, Depakote, Diagnosis, dysphoric mania, Geek, Googleability, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Lithium, Mayonnaise, Med School, Meds, mixed states, Monotherapy, Moods, Optimal Experience, Point Of View, Psychiatrist, Psychiatrists, Psychological Issues, Reader Attention, Relapse, Ritalin, stuffCategories
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