I know meds are different for everybody. I know, I know, I know.

I'm just curious if anyone else experienced major irritability or agitation which took a while to get going after switching to seroquel.

As it says in my signature I am currently working with my pdoc to systematically try meds one at a time. I went on seroquel at 100 for a month, then up to 150, then after looking at the mood charts, went back down to 100 a little over a week ago.

Seroquel seems to be a big help to my baseline mood and my ability to bounce back from setbacks. My default mode is depression, I have ultrarapid cycling but if you zoom out I've been in a bad low for almost 5 years. My life is chaotic, so the fact that I can bounce back a lot faster when the BS hits is helpful. But I noticed almost immediately that Seroquel does NOTHING for my stability, in fact might even make it worse. Now I'm starting to think that it's causing irritability and agitation which is starting to get pretty ridiculous. I'm not positive of that though, it's less clear-cut than the other stuff I'm keeping an eye on while tracking my moods, and I was having a bit of trouble with it before going on the Seroquel.

I am suspicious for a couple reasons. First, I know that this is a possible side effect of antipsychotics, and I do occasionally get restless leg after a seroquel dose, much more so the first week, now it's fairly rare except late in the evening. I haven't heard that seroquel is known for it, but Abilify for example I've found has a bad reputation for irritability, agitation, and anger. I tried Abilify a number of years ago and had to stop within 2 days due to extreme agitation, panic, etc to the point where I juuust barely avoided throwing up in public, etc. So one medication in the class has done it to me already, albeit much faster and more clear-cut.

This is terrible, because the mood effects from seroquel are a huge improvement from my perspective. But if I am unstable and frequently deadlocking due to rage and so forth, I don't get too much more stuff accomplished to rebuild my life than I do if I'm just depressed. Fortunately I have good self-control (at least when people are around) and mostly just yell to myself when I'm alone, and I've attacked furniture a couple times. :P

I feel like the next step is to drop the lamictal and try a different stabilizer. The meds are such a frigging mess of contradictions - a benefit and a cost that is hard to weigh. Dexedrine is similar, a large benefit, and a large cost. I am so sick of this, but there is no other choice than to be systematic and grind through gathering data until we figure out the best combo, even as life continues to throw endless crap at me.