I had the ugly headaches on it going on it both times. They went away fairly quickly though. The first time I was in a clinical trial and had very clearly been on the placebo (would have been IP but didn't have insurance for mental health and lied on the depression scales to avoid being put there) and then moved on to the part of the study where you know you are getting lamictal and it was even more clear from the headaches that I'd not had it before. I'd guess the headaches were about a week each time. Unpleasant though. The first time it just made me sick. They increased the dose people in the trial were to take rather drastically and the end result was I got sick, stayed sick and after a year had to stop the med. When I had been through almost every other common med except Seroquel which I was terrified of because I'd worked in a psych facility and the psychiatrist used Seroquel to snow people which left me believing that was the effect of the drug we tried it again and it went great until the rash. I threw up once early on but thatw as it. And after the rash I wound up on Seroquel after all but it wasn't nearly what I thought it would be like.

It's hard when meds are really scary to you. I absolutely refused to be on ADs when I first needed meds (looking back it was a good instinct but the bipolar wasn't diagnosed yet and there wasn't any reason to suspect it except for the manic summer I didn't tell my therapist about (I was in college so didn't see him in the summer) and it took a year to convince me to try them. By the time I went on mood stabilizers I was very aware that I needed them badly if I wanted to stay alive so that made them less scary. Going on APs was scary at first and then I had bad reactions to several in a row which made me even more afraid of the Seroquel which has worked well for me although I've had to add a 2nd AP recently because I couldn't increase the dose any higher and was still having psychotic symptoms. That was also scary but so far so good. I increase that dose tomorrow and then bring my AD up a little bit (I've been on half the dose for months) at the end of the week. At this rate my now-6 months old-episode will probably be under control fully by the end of the summer which is not fun to think about but I'm also just glad to see an end in sight (and summer is a rough time to stabilize me anyway).

Right now I'm glad I was able to decide to start the 2nd AP and wish I'd chosen to do so earlier and also that I'd chosen to go IP a while back in this episode because I feel like I made myself stay sick longer than was necessary by refusing to go in.

But I think with this disease there are always regrets.

I hope you are feeling better.