I was on many different anti-depressants and though some seemed to help a little it never quite did the trick. When I was diagnosed with bipolar I was told that most anti-depressants wouldn’t work for treating bipolar as the depression associated with bipolar is different. In fact anti-depressants can cause a bipolar person to go into a manic or hypo-manic episode.

I was very surprised that I was bipolar. I was always, like you, moderately to severely depressed and the hypo-manic episodes were fairly mild. It wasn't until I mentioned something about paranoia that my doctor caught on, I'd never mentioned anything like that before, and he had been concerned that none of the antidepressants seemed to work very well for me. Now we know why.

I tried Lithium Citrate and got pretty bad hives, although it seemed to help quite a bit, and Lithium Carbonate sent me into a hypo-manic episode. I am on Lamictal right now. My doc put me on it because of its success in treating bipolar people whose major problem is depression.