Posted by bleauberry on April 8, 2009, at 16:28:08
In reply to Memantine (Namenda) for depressoin. Success?, posted by SLS on April 8, 2009, at 14:35:56
I think I remember 3 instances here over the last year.
One was a guy bedridden with a long history of med failures, with apparently a lot more problems than just depression. I remember his current list included prozac and ritalin. He was in the hospital. While there, he was started on 30mg memantine with no titration. Don't know what the rationale was. He was here just long enough to say what a miracle his new life was.
The other two instances were people saying they had not developed tolerance to their ritalin while taking memantine with it.
I am not the person to ask how it feels, because I only tried 5mg for about 3 days and it felt yuck. More tired, more depressed, more withdrawn. But ya know, 3 days, me being so weird, you have to take my trial of it with a grain of salt. It was monotherapy, not an augmentation of anything.
Since Parnate has a stimulant phase to it, memantine might play into that, maybe? It's actions are sort of in the family of lamictal, so I don't know how those two will play together.
I asked myself, if this question was asked by someone else, and SLS answered it, he might say something like...increase parnate to 100mg or 120mg? I personally would say, get the antipsychotic down. I would also have to ponder, when I think of all the clinical trials on lamictal, they all showed that it "delayed" relapse for a period of 6 to 9 months. It did not prevent relapse and did not provide longterm benefit. You know yourself better than anyone, but on the outside looking in I have to ask myself, why not a higher parnate dose, why is lamictal still there, and what is abilify doing to help. You know the answers to these questions, I don't.
poster:bleauberry
thread:889478
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090408/msgs/889506.html