Posted by River1924 on September 4, 2003, at 0:29:20
In reply to Lamictal and upper back pain, posted by River1924 on August 31, 2003, at 0:00:37
After I read the quote about lamictal that I included below, I realized I may have induced atypical hypomanic symptoms. I stopped my antidepressant and added a low dose of over-the-counter lithium. This seems to have "cured" the adverse effect of back pain (most of the time) and lowered my level of anxiety.
"It [lamictal] has not been shown to have "mood stabilizer" properties in a thoroughly reliable way such that it can be relied upon, in my view, to prevent the kind of worsening of bipolar symptoms that antidepressants can cause. Rather, it has been shown in some cases to cause manic-side symptoms; not rarely, in my experience, although the published cases are few and the big series by Calabrese and colleagues had no cases of "induced mania" with lamotrigine. I wonder if they were only counting obvious mania, as opposed to, for example, an increase in anxiety, which can be a "manic" side symptom."
poster:River1924
thread:255820
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030902/msgs/256798.html