Hello to everyone,
I want to say thank y0u to all of the readers who leave comments on this blog. I know that we all can learn so much from each others. I get a lot of questions from readers- I want to let everyone know that I read all of them- I try to answer in the blog posts themselves. I still have not found a way to get to the questions as mush as I would like to. My books answer the questions about bipolar disorder treatment and management- so that is where I lead people first- but I know there are many personal questions I would like to answer. I do encourage readers to leave their opinions and advice on the comments.
Julie
Julie, Hi its’ Sue from Tennessee. I just wanted to tell you what I did yesterday. I went to Nashville,TN. to the state capital to talk to my state senator about the cuts to the mental health budget. NAMI invited members of DBSA to come on Monday to a meeting they were having with their members to teach them what and how to talk to their legislators. They even put me up in a hotel!!After our meeting on Monday I felt prepared to talk to my state senator with whom I had set up a meeting for on Tuesday at 1:30P.M.Tuesday morning their was a meeting put on by the Tennessee Coalition for mental health and substance Abuse. Got breakfast and lunch too. After I saw my senator I felt so proud. 15 years ago I wouldn’t have been out of bed!!!Sue
Hi Sue! That is amazing. We all need people to advocate for those of us with brain disorders. I am glad you can get out of bed now- I certainly know what you mean. If you have time, there are a lot of questions here on the blog I can’t get to- but I know people would love your advice. Julie
Dear Julie, I too have bp 2. I am currently on lamictal 200 mg at night. My mental health has been a struggle since I was 16 when I began having suicidal ideations. I am now going to be 40 in April. My life has been about one hospitalization to the next, 7 times in total. I have tried every medication except MAOIs to control the depression and finally have found effexor helpful. The lamictal has been a godsend for me. I have tried lithium and became toxic. I tried depakote and my hair fell out in clumps. It is so difficult to balance the benefit vs the side effects. After a very bad manic then depression episode in 2006, I had to go on disability for the first time. I was lucky to have a social worker who sent me for vocational testing. 2 years of DBT and therapy, proper medication and I am now at the top of my class in my second year of a 4 year batchelors nursing program with a psych minor and on the dean’s list. I have a wonderful education coach who specializes in higher education strategies for people with bipolar illness and they have proven to bring fantastic results. With hope there is recovery and the creation of a beautiful life becomes possible. I read about your struggles and accomplishments and feel inspired. I want to thank you for bringing awareness to the disease. You have brought dignity to many of us. I now feel that my voice should be heard. I feel that bipolar is a disease that is widely misunderstood in the general medical profession. I am often hesitant to share my struggles with my peers for fear of the stigma it carries. I want to feel proud of what I have accomplished and want to help others through the process of treatment to find the hope and structure so crutial to living a good life. I write to ask if you ever set up peer mentoring. I would like to help someone as I have been helped. I can share the strategies for going to school later in life with bipolar and all the things I have learned to make my goal of sucess in school a reality. I do hope to hear from you. I also suggest trying cool tea bags on your eyes, the tannins can often decrease the puffiness. And as strange as it sounds, preperatin H will absolutely take down the puffiness, just be careful to not get it into your eyes. Good luck.
Hi, Julie. I read your recent article pertaining to medication side effects and wanted to share some comments on my experiences. I have been using lithium for 20 years and have found the drug to be rather beneficial to my overall mental health. However, I did experience a hypomanic episode during the fall and had to increase my lithiun from 900 mg per day to 1500 mg per day. To make a long story short, the increase helped me psychologically, but it lead to a cystic acne breakout in my back and neck. I have had unwanted side effects with SSRI’s and atypical anti-psychotics as well. The question remains, do the benefits of drug therapy outweigh the side effects. It’s up to us as patients to make that determination–not our doctors. If you feel like the side effects run your life more so than your mental illness then it may be time to look at other options.
Julie,
Just looked you up because I haven’t heard from you. Normally I get emails, but it has been a while.
I hope you are well.
I experienced significant hair loss with Lithium, however choose to keep taking it. But I can not take Depakote, Lamictal, Abilify, or Geodon. It is frustrating to find meds that work with out side affects. I don’t have health insurance, so finding something at reasonable cost is very challenging.
Hello,
I have bipolar 1 and have been diagnosed for the past 3 years. I have been hospitalised 5 times. I have had 2 rounds of ECT and have tried many drugs. The drug toxicity was overwhelming. You’ve probably heard of the term, ‘paradoxial effect’. Well, that was certainly the case for me. I was still bipolar on the drugs – only more so. My mood swings were even more extreme. I became anxious, depressed, manic and rapid cycling. I became suicidal and the drugs gave me a convenient means of acting on that. 3 of my hospitalizations were initiated by drug overdoses. But I persisted with the drugs as I was sold the message that this was the only to manage this illness. I remember a nurse in hospital told me, ‘I read your notes before I came into your room. When I first looked at you, I thought to myself – why would she want to kill herself, she’s so beautiful’. Well, the drugs have taken care of that, too. I gained 20ks. My hair fell out. I developed acne. But still, I took the drugs.
It reached a point 4 months ago where my psychiatrist agreed that the drugs had done nothing except make the situation worse. So,I’m off meds but continue to see him monthly to monitor me. What I have left to manage this illness are lifestyle and behavioural strategies as described by Julie A Fast and other writers with a similar viewpoint. Now for the good news. I’m better than I’ve ever been. Just having bipolar is a breeze compared to dealing with drug toxicity on top of it. I’ve even lost weight – 5kg so far. For those of you who DO benefit from drugs – that’s wonderful and I wish you all the very best. However, some of us don’t and there needs to be a time where we draw a line in the sand and say, ‘no more’. Drug treatment for bipolar is a very inexact science. It’s loaded with trial and error that can create real damage to one’s life or create such pain that we choose to take our own lives to escape it. We need to be very well-informed and possess exceptional self-advocacy skills to navigate our way through the system.
I would like to comment on Jennifer and Joe’s comments. Jennifer, you are an inspiration. And I admire your generosity in wanting to share your knowledge with others. Joe, I couldn’t agree more.
Dear Julie, Thank you for your work and dedication. I will try to keep this first submission short. You probably know a lot of the science to follow, but I will spell it out for the benefit of other readers. I was walking home from work and was hit by an SUV. I recovered physically(mostly), but had a growing depression/anxiety problem. I nearly cured it myself through vitamins/herbs/amino acids, but the anxiety kept coming back. I was relucatant to have a psychiatrist guess at the problem and prescribe the latest cocktail. I recovered well physically in the following 3 months, but had a growing depression and anxiety problem from the concussion. I nearly cured myself through my knowledge of vitamins/herbs/nutrition, but couldn’t shake the near panic attacks. I finally agreed to see a psychiatrist and that started a harrowing journey. He diagnosed me as bipolar and put me on a cocktail of medications. These were not working well to say the least. Luckily, my sister mentioned to my niece’s neurologist(my niece has a type of seizures) that I was diagnosed bipolar. The neurologist was suprised that I wasn’t at least given an EEG to measure excess brain activity before this diagnosis was made. (Turns out EEG only confirms epilepsy, it cannot confirm/rule out bipolar. Genetic biomarker testing of bipolar is in the works by a Canadian company GeneNews http://www.genenews.com). Thankfully my sister looked up neurologists in my area so I could get some actual science based testing (not just the 40 minutes of questions followed by a guess on the part of the psychiatrist as to what meds MIGHT work). The work with the neurologist did not provide much, but he told me about a husband-wife team that had the answer. Dr. B is an integrative physician(believes in more than pharmaceuticals and surgery) and his wife is a nurse-practitioner with a Master’s in psychiatry. She deals with a company called NeuroScience http://www.neurorelief.com that can actually measure your brain’s neurotransmitter levels. Thank God I had finally found what I was looking for. I had known for some years that something wasn’t quite right. I knew that bipolar was on both sides of my family, but like many with mental health struggles, I thought “Oh no, not me”. I refused to go to a mental health professional and let them guess as to what meds to put me on based on 1 hour of “Tell me about your past” and “How do you feel about this?” I wanted some real scientific testing before I would let someone prescribe drugs that can have strong side effects. Meds can also be toxic to the liver, as those who have to have their liver enzymes tested know. Unfortunately no one knew of this testing before. Even though I was on a double dose of the latest anti-depressant, my serotonin level came in at half of the minimum that it should be. Of the 13 brain chemicals that they test for, Mrs. B told me I was drastically low in 11. She said that I may have already been low in several, but the accident probably made them worse. She said she had never seen so many levels so low in her years of testing. She went so far as to say that my epinephrine (adrenaline) level was so low that she had “no earthly idea how I was able to sit in her office and function”(talk/think/remember) let alone be able to ask her pertinent questions based on research I was doing. The therapy used is a course of Targeted Amino Acid Therapy. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of protein, and in everyone’s diet. They prescribe higher levels of certain ones as they are the precursors to the needed neurotransmitters. The body turns these into neurotransmitters and brings the brain chemisty back in balance. She said I also helped cure myself because the wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals I already take helped my body to make the necessary compounds. With follow up testing, all 13 fell into an average range considered normal or acceptable. To make a very long story short(all the twists and turns would make this letter about 8 full pages long) I have been completely off anti-depressants for a month now, and have cut down the anti-anxiety medication from 4 a day to 1(and will soon be able to stop that too.) In talking to several doctors and psychiatrists, I have learned that NO pharmaceutical medication actually makes neurotransmitters, they can only keep what amount you have present in the synapses longer. If someone is low in certain neurotransmitters, medication may not help. Medication is useful in cases where neurotransmitters are too high, and instances where the receptors are damaged. I want to say that I am not against pharmaceuticals, and that anyone reading this should continue on their prescribed course of medication and should not change their treatment without professional medical consent. I am firing off a lot of emails, so instead of listing a lot more info, I will give links:
Lithium in Lithium Orotate 20 times more bio-available(absorbed) than in Lithium Carbonate, also fewer side effects, lithium blood serum level measurement not required(though recommended periodically), also lithium is an element and not toxic to the liver(in recommended doses)http://mysite.verizon.net/res003jh/lithium-orotate/
good explanation of symptoms of high/low levels of 4 most widely researched neurotransmitters (click on 4 tabs at bottom Introduction/Neurotransmitter Levels/Norepinephrine: Arousal to Panic/Medication)
http://www.womensaccounts.com/mental_health_Carver_neurotrasmitter.html
cancer, bipolar, schizophrenia and several other diseases linked to 3 pathogens in the body: a parasite in the pancreas, a bacteria, and a virus. Anti-parasite kit used on parasite, specific sound frequencies being employed to eradicate other 2
http://clark.pamrotella.com/
http://www.healingsounds.com/
It starts today.
In the name of Yod Hey Shin Vav Hey (the name of Jesus in ancient Hebrew) I ask for strength, health and inspiration for you all those that read this.
I’m here by mistake. I started reading and I have to tell you that your blog is cool. You are writing so many interesting things. I disagree with many of them, but it’s ok. I will probably visit your site more often. I would like to use your words on my own blog. Is it posiible? – Marta
Hi, great blog. I am also leading one’s so I know how hard it is. Your articles are great, although not always I agree with your opinions, but in spite of that I will visit your blog more often. I wish you the success and the perseverance in running the blog, Monica
Hi Monica,
Feel free to send in some of your ideas. I am always open to new ways of looking at things. Also, a link to your blog would be great. Julie
hi Julie, thanks for all!
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I read your article titled “Don’t Judge Me for my Depression” in the NAMI of Kent County (Michigan)newsletter. It is excellent! I have passed it on to others. I suffer from bipolar, depression, and OCD and there have been times when I have asked myself if I have too little faith to let go and let God run my life when I have severe fears of contamination. I now know I have a deep faith in God but I also have a chemical imbalance in my brain.
Wow that was a great post, thanks 😉 Theres so much to learn and understand in order to live a normal, balanced lifstyle despite the scurge of worries that this disease inevetibly brings our way. By working and communicating together, we can begin to not only accept and manage our condition, but furthermore, learn how to conquer this terrible affliction. Its great to know we are all looking out for each other.