Posted by yesac on November 13, 2006, at 12:41:25
In reply to lithium and unipolar depression, posted by wishingstar on November 7, 2006, at 20:24:57
Just wanted to chime in here with my experience.
I'm a lot like you. I have quite severe, suicidal, agitated depression. I went through tons of antidepressants with no response. Some made me feel worse, particularly Prozac and Parnate.
Finally, with much trepidation, I tried lithium. I've been on it now for about a year and a half. It's the first drug (out of 2) that has helped me even a little bit.
It's not to say that everything's great now. Mostly what lithium helps me with is the agitation and flipping out/snapping. I used to want to bash my head into a wall a lot of the time. But lithium doesn't do much for depression, and quite honestly, it doesn't do much for suicidality either. But combined with Seroquel, my depression and suicidal thoughts seem to be reduced a little bit.
It took about 6 weeks before lithium kicked in, and it was only when I got to 600mgs. If I go down to 300mgs, it doesn't work at all.
In terms of side effects, I have one major side effect.... a fine hand tremor. Basically, my hands quiver all the time, which gets really f*cking annoying, but there's nothing much I can do about it, so I just have to put up with it. I haven't noticed any "dulling", except when I tried to take 900mgs, I got really weirdly spaced out.
So that's my experience. It hasn't been a miracle drug or anything, but it's done more than every other drug I've taken (except Seroquel), so I guess that's something.
By the way, I just finished a 10 week trial of EMSAM (the MAOI patch).... it didn't do anything for me.
Good luck. I hope you have some success with lithium.
poster:yesac
thread:701434
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20061110/msgs/703135.html