Hi guys!

This was brought up in passing in another thread, and I relate to it so much I wanted to bring it up generally.

Some 25 years ago, I had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety for several years and yet with clear signs of hypomania and mania. It was not until a bout of hypersexuality that my pdoc of the time diagnosed BP (when I had brought it up about a year prior, he had said that people were finding BP under ever rock, in other words, thought it was way over-diagnosed, and therefore didn't apply to me (!!)).

Anyhow, I was first prescribed Lamictal (which helped enormously with depression, but not with hypo/mania). I had been an alcoholic for some 8 years before that. And poof! After the Lamictal kicked in, I just didn't crave alcohol anymore! Since then, I've had the occasional social drink, but that's it.

So has anyone had a similar experience? How prevalent do you think it is to self-treat MI with substances? And how difficult has it been to get your pdocs to understand this?