Posted by bob (hi folks, I'm back) on March 3, 2000, at 20:30:11
In reply to Re: Experienced Wellbutrin Users Please Help, posted by anne on March 3, 2000, at 14:05:57
Anne's advice about tapering off a med is good for just about any of the stuff we take.
I doubt, too, that Wellbutrin could GIVE you an anxiety disorder, but it may be helping an exisitng one express itself a bit more obviously. Depression and anxiety disorders go hand-in-hand for a lot of people, and at times the symptoms of one can mask any sign of the other.
I'm a good example of that. I started seeing my therapist due to some rather severe daily panic attacks. I've been observably depressed since I was 8, but I'd never really shown any signs of panic disorder until I was 34, just before I started treatment. By the time we decided I needed medication, we were back working on depression issues during our sessions. Over the next two years and something like 11 different combinations of meds, I'd present either more depressed or more panicked depending on which med wasn't working for me at the time. It all taught me not to take the panic disorder side of my condition lightly, and to thank my stars for finding klonopin when I did -- it's managed my panic wonderfully for 18 months or so now.
As for Wellbutrin -- I started right off at 300mgSR/d in reaction to severe withdrawal from Paxil. While both were in my system, things were fine. After the paxil washed out of me, tho, my Welbutrin demons started popping up. It lost its efficacy as an AD at 300/d, so I went up to 450. For me, it wasn't anxiety so much as it was irritability and, eventually, uncontrollable rages. Nothing a little perphenazine (an antipsychotic) couldn't handle, tho. Still didn't have any efficacy as an AD on its own or with Prozac for me, and these three together eventually put me in the ER due to a nasty interaction between the prozac and perphenazine ... but the story ends happily, because this chain of events brought klonopin into my mix.
16 months after that, I tried wellbutrin again, at 75mg (nonSR) 2xd to augment the nortriptyline I'm on now. All it did was bring back the irritability.
Oh, and my otherwise non-existent allergy to cats. Off wellbutrin, I'm fine. On wellbutrin ... contact with a cat will swell my eyes shut in ten minutes or less. And I've never shown any allergic reactions to anything else EVER. Weird science.
... maybe it's just me, but over the last year (or so) checking in on this board, it seems like wellbutrin triggers more love-it or hate-it reactions than any other med, with the possible exception of paxil.
cheers,
bob
poster:bob (hi folks, I'm back)
thread:10786
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000302/msgs/25881.html