This isn't a new med for me, just a higher dose that they usually avoid (I'll explain). The med is called Emsam and it is my antidepressant. It's an MAOI which are the ADs you get when you fail all the others, even though they work really well for a lot of people, because they interact with foods and medications and the reactions can be dangerous so you have to be on high alert to use one. Not all drs. will use MAOIs at all now; my enormous hospital system told me they put about 10 people per year on one.

Emsam only has 3 dose possibilities and you can only mess with that so much because it is a patch. I was on 9 mg for years until this spring when I was so agitated from mania/mixed episode that we lowered it and it stayed lowered until I was in the hospital last month. I'm now trying the highest dose in a last ditch effort to stop this depression. If it doesn't work then I am likely to do ECT.

The 5-7 days is because I already had this in my system. If I hadn't it would have taken a month or longer before we'd have known.

Waiting is hard. Waiting this time is very hard because I know that this is likely to be my last chance before ECT unless something really surprising happens. And I'm still waiting to hear if they'll accept me for ECT. I've been through a ton of meds in 9 months and have a long history of problems with meds (I'm on my 67th cocktail or something like that). We got a partial response with an AP this summer but the dose couldn't go up any more and I developed some major problems and had to get off it fast. That's why I was in the hospital and all the hospital could do was return me to where I was when this started in January. Which didn't help so now we're doing the last few things that can be done prior to trying ECT.

I'm really tired of meds failing and thinking that something good was happening with them only to have something bad happen and so I'm fine with doing ECT. If it's not a med and is something different I'm pretty interested.

What med(s) are you waiting on?