Antidepressant

I went off my meds and was manic for about 2 months . Went back on meds. I went on anti-psychotics and a mood stabilizer.

The anti-psychotics made me too down. Now I am on lamictal and lexapro. I am titrating up on my lexapro but for 1 week I have been on 30 which is higher than I was on the first time.

How long does it take you to level out after mania? Did anyone else plunge down into depression first like I have?

For those of you on anti-psychotics, does it bring you down too low and into depression?

if the antipsychotic is too high it will bring me down so my doc knows i will only go to a certain point. If you are depressed after mania well of course thats how the bp cycles
when i recently started prozac i got worse than trippy than worse than trippy than anxiety and now im hypomanic . I have no other expierence on AD but this one so i have no idea wth is normal
just know you will come back up ,.....we always do my friend

if the antipsychotic is too high it will bring me down so my doc knows i will only go to a certain point. If you are depressed after mania well of course thats how the bp cycles
when i recently started prozac i got worse than trippy than worse than trippy than anxiety and now im hypomanic . I have no other expierence on AD but this one so i have no idea wth is normal
just know you will come back up ,.....we always do my friend

I really usually stay cuckoo for coconuts until my stabilizer reaches the therapeutic level, for me, Lamictal was 300 mg which took awhile. Like 50 mg a week to get there- 6-8 weeks.

I can't do APs, so they are just PRN when the visuals are more than I can handle.

That is what is so weird. The anti-depressant isn't making me hypomanic at all. We'll see. Maybe as it builds up in my system.

Ssris don't tend to trigger mania in me but that's just me. SNRIs and NARIs send me mixed or manic. Everyone is different. I've been on ssris for years with only help from them.

My ap keeps me stable but it's a low baseline.

Lexapro sedates me. I can't take more than a 10mg dose each day or I start sleeping 16+ hours. The lethargy mimics my depression cycle so it was hard to tell the difference when I originally started a 20mg dose.

Perhaps you have a similar reaction as me to lexapro?

My dr is using welbutrin to level the lethargy out because 150mg gives me energy but 300 makes me have a manic like episode if it's my only med at the time! (My dx is BP II)

I always hit the bottom after a big mania but I don't think it's the APs, I think it's just how I cycle. We can sort of prepare for it but sometimes it is easier than others. Right now crashing is a big risk because I haven't been able to tolerate more than 50% of my AD in 2 months? or so. For a while I was off it, then on 33% and now 50% but so far definitely not ready for more than 50%. So we'll have to hope we catch the downswing in time to get enough AD in my system. My AD is an MAOI which is really, really stimulating (which works well for me most of the time although it means high dose APs) so when I have a bad, sustained mania, it becomes a problem. It's a patch so I've done a lot of scissor work lately. I am not good at remembering episodes, I tend to remember depressions when I was really manic first but I think it usually goes mania=>increased AP and decreased AD==>improvement==>eventually leads to depression, usually a hard crash==>leads to return of full AD dose and sometimes a slightly higher dose although we try to avoid that dose==>several months of working with meds and therapy==>eventual recovery. I'm always mixed through 99% of it but the mania predominates and then the depression predominates although sometimes there will be a depression in the middle of 2 manic periods (I suspect that's happening now) and half the days I won't know what to say I am although looking back I can see.

So far we've barely gotten even extremely high doses of APs to calm me down a little. So they haven't had a chance to be destructive. When I start a 2nd AP next month (latuda) we'll see what happens then.