I am finding it really hard to stay on my medication, and I haven't even managed to give it a trial. The meds aren't said to me working fully until at least a month after taking them regularly. I took them regularly for the first week or two, but then I dropped my Anti-depressant on the advice on my pdoc, we'd been titrating it down because my reaction to it gave evidence of my bipolar.

I started talking Celexa mid-August because I was feeling/thinking very suicidal, but I couldn't, for whatever reason, make myself act on it, though I'll admit I got the knife out too many times. I ended up thinking, I'm not getting anywhere like this, no closer to life and no closer to death. I thought I might as well try something new. So I started taking the AD and I was feeling better within the first week, and I kept feeling better and better. For the first time in a long time I was just enjoying life, and not because I was in love or anything like that.

I think I may have even spilled into hypomania, but mid-September it ended, and the fall from that feeling to depressed is so hard to take. After a bit of a crisis, my meds were up and again I felt good for a while, not up to the hypomania of before, but somehow even more at home in my own skin. Two weeks later back into depression and again up the meds go, but a weird thing happened at that point I started cycling every few days or sometimes even more rapidly. I got the bipolar diagnosis then, very late November, but when I look back at my past the bipolar was somewhat present even without the meds.

I dropped down of the Celexa slowly and started taking Epival (which is generically divalproex or valproic acid and the trade name in the US is Depakote) and that seems to work for a while, but one I quit the AD it seemed not to works as well and I slipped back into depression, though perhaps a much more stable depression. I was good at taking the mood stabilizer initially, but I find it really hard to, since it seems not to be doing much of anything.

I'm supposed to take it in the morning and in the evening, but I've too often slept through the morning one and just not taken it. And worse there have even been 3 or 4 day spans where I haven't taken it at all, because A. it just doesn't seem to work so why bother and B. I don't really want to be on meds anyway and sometimes the very negative C. I don't want to use it all up so that I will have enough to OD on if I chooose to.

I guess I just wanted to ask how everyone made it through the first long stretch and how do you deal with not wanting to be on any meds at all.

Laura