My daughter has mood swings and is scarily impulsive which has led to her cutting becoming more severe. She is depressed and has some anxiety and some bipolar qualities (no clear manic episode though), but mainly she needs help evening out her moods and not to flip out so easily when she perceives someone has done her wrong.

She's been on lexapro for about 6 months with very slight improvement until about a month ago when she cut herself terribly at the end of a relationship and has been cutting and quite sad since. She has an excellent new psychiatrist who has prescribed lamictal, the only problem is that getting up to a therapeutic dose is such a slow process, sometimes I'm not sure if she'll make it long enough to see if this drug will do her some good. Her pdoc is "borderline uncomfortable" with continuing to treat her as an outpatient and is encouraging me to get her into an acute inpatient setting. My understanding is that if she were inpatient or partial hospitalization, she could titrate up more quickly because they could watch her for Stevens-Johnson syndrome more carefully, which seems to be her pdoc's biggest concern about this drug in young people.

Anyway, that was a long way of asking how people have done on lamictal. I'm feeling pretty desperate for her to feel better quickly.