Well, you must realize that all medications have side effects and they are going to
happily take all the nutrition that they need to metabolize in your system. When we
take medications once a day for 7 days per week, we can be pretty sure that our
nutritional stores are being affected.

What you need to do, in my view, is to talk to a pharmacist about helping you purchase a pharmaceutical grade multiple vitamin and mineral that will offset the effects of the meds' use of your stores of vitamins and minerals.

Your sex life will probably improve as your nutrition improves. Why psychiatrists don't advise patients of the need to supplement their diets is beyond me.

All medications leave an acidic ash (or residue) that our systems must metabolize.
Taking the meds daily makes it difficult for the kidneys to catch up with the job of
metabolizing that acidic ash.

One of the simplest things you can start with is to remove the current salt shaker
you're using. Go with Himalayan sea salt (the purest in the world) that has all the
trace minerals which are missing from the system to a degree when we take meds
so frequently. That's just a minor start. (Salts which are processed in this country
and are purified do not have the trace minerals that we need.)

When you're feeling down from the meds, cut two lemons in half and squeeze them
into a glass of about 8 oz of water. Drink it; if, in 4 hours, you don't feel better,
repeat the process. It works for many of us, because the lemon is so alkaline when
it's digested (even though it takes very acidic on the tongue), and that alleviates
the buildup of acidic residue from meds in your tissues and fluids. I use it occasionally when I know that I've had too much acid in my system.

If you're unable to really function satisfactorily with your current meds, tell your
psychiatrist that you want to try another. Often, it takes several different efforts
with various meds to find the combination you need for the short term.

For the long term, become pro-active in your care. Learn all you can about nutrition to ease bipolar illness, including things such as changing your diet to more alkaline foods. Please see alkalinefoods.com to learn which foods help in making diet changes, or check AcidFoods.com to learn which ones to cut back on in your diet.

Recently, new information suggests that wheat, rye, barley, and possibly oats contain gluten which is very bad for our systems. If you can, eliminate wheat from your diet and substitute more nuts (particularly pecans, walnuts), seeds, and green vegetables in your diet. Have a fresh green salad once every day. (The current wheat being produced has been re-engineered by agricultural scientists to contain far more gluten, and it is turning out that it is very harmful for humans to ingest. The best source on that is Dr. David Williams' recent New York best seller called Wheat Belly. It explains it all.)

Hope you are able to grasp all of this and make efforts at changes gradually that suit your style for improvement in feeling tone.