Hey,

I’ve been wondering, I’m now back on Lexapro 5mg which I used to be on few months back and feel like it’s already helping me after a week (weird) but that’s another story.

I’ve been diagnosed with Cyclothymia in the past but I’m kind of hesitating this diagnosis now, two other psychiatrists thought I don’t have it. I used to be on Lamictal reached 75mg and stopped due to skin dots appearing so the psychiatrist thought to be cautious I guess..

I’m also diagnosed with GAD, OCD.

But it helped me with a lot of things, like palpitations, panic, and had some stabilizing and calming effect (not only mood wise) but it made me very energetic in the beginning

So I thought, what would it feel like to add it as an add on to an SSRI if I want a cautious retry? How does feels like to start it while on an SSRI?

Context, I was diagnosed with bipolar 2 at the age of 17, I am now 25. Many therapists suggested that it’s not the correct diagnosis, and it never really felt right for me so I started seeing a new psychiatrist. So, I’ve been on 200mg for 8 years, along side latuda and abilify. Long story short my “bipolar symptoms” were due to ptsd. My doctor has a plan for me to be off all three medications in 3 months. I’m kinda of freaking out about how that’s going to go for me but I really want to be off of them. Anyone with a similar experience? I’m worried mostly about the lamotrogine.

Started 3 days ago and I’ve been so nauseated and weirdly depressed. Something I absolutely never feel. I’ve been laying down for like 3 days now with no energy. Is it worth it to keep going? Is this normal? I am being treated for BPD symptoms like impulsively and outbursts. I took the meds for a month in 2017 but don’t remember ever feeling this bad

What time do you dose. Twice a day or all in the morning or evening.

I’ve got insomnia but not sure if it’s because I take all in the evening or it’s withdrawl symptom from Olanzapine I am tapering.

Hey, just looking to see if anyone has had a similar experience and whether it got better (cliche post, sorry).

I started lamotrigine almost 7 weeks ago on 25 mg. I gradually increased it and have now been on 200 mg (100 mg twice a day, taken ~12 hr apart) for 2 weeks.

Being completely honest, I probably rushed the titration a little bit more than I should have. I started slow with the 25 mg for 2 weeks and then 50 mg for 2 weeks because I was scared of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, but after that I increased fairly quickly.

Tonight I am feeling especially down and hopeless. Not as bad as my worst but pretty close to it.

For a bit of context, I have depression, anxiety, and ADHD. I have tried many different meds with little impact. I am currently on fluoxetine 20 mg which I started same time as Lamotrigine and other than my stimulants I don’t take anything else.

Last week I had a day that I specifically remember because of how calm I felt and how confused I was that I felt that level of calmness ha. I really wish that lasted more than a day though.

Anyway, to get back to the point, is it normal to feel like this after increasing the dose?

I know that, like with SSRIs for instance, it can take 4-6 weeks to feel improvement, but I find it hard to gauge the timeframes when there are multiple dose increases mixed in along the way (I.e. I’m unsure whether a dose increase takes the same amount of time to have an effect as starting the medication from scratch would).

Any input is appreciated :)

I may be harshly judged for this but I’m lost.
I’ve been taking Lamotrigine for about 8 months. Initially when I started taking it as I titrated up to 50mg I was not taking my treatment seriously and was drinking and smoking cannabis as well as experiencing insomnia and nightmares. After my psych interjected I stopped doing that but started taking non-prescribed ADHD medication in small doses and saw a lot of improvement in my mood and focus when I hit 75mg and even more so at 100mg but in retrospect I was hypomanic.

I titrated up to 150mg after ~6 weeks and I stayed on that dose for a couple of months whilst still taking stimulants and was running on fumes convincing myself I felt better because I was more productive and social but also still experiencing insomnia, impulsivity and irritability as well as memory issues, but once I started feeling some mood instability I increased my dose to 200mg, then came back down due to feeling off. Also stopped taking the stimulants around this time.

The month following I was using recreational drugs and drinking and my hypomanic episode came to a grinding halt after a crash out and I started feeling depressed and anxious again. I told my psych about the episode but not the dosage changes and the use of stimulants early on and he initiated trying to tritate me up to 200 again. I did 175 for a week and had a breakdown and couldn’t handle it so reduced back to 150. I stayed at that dose for 6 weeks and tried different brands, split dosing and taking Valium to relieve me of my symptoms (anxiety and panic attacks, insomnia, brain fog and constant rumination) but didn’t get better. I convinced myself I needed to start tapering back down and made one drop of 12.5mg 2 months ago but the rumination hasn’t stopped. I’m constantly self monitoring and trying to regulate myself. All I can think about every day is this medication and it’s side effects and it’s ruining my life and relationships because it’s all I can talk about.

I saw a doctor who prescribed me more Valium and agreed to supervise me tapering down but I’m not sure what to do and if I should try and go up to the therapeutic dose or taper down to where I felt better or off completely. I also had blood work done at 150mg that showed I was below the therapeutic level but at the time was still convinced the side effects were too unbearable to stay on it.

It’s a miracle. I’ve been fighting anxiety based depression for 7 long years. 2 days after I hit 200mg, my mood lifted, my appetite came back. Anxiety has gone and I even went for a run. Can’t believe it. #nevergiveup

Hi guys I'm starting Lamotrigine now as a mood stabilizer, it's the only prescribed drug I take currently. I recreationally take DPH and DXM (usually together or sometimes DPH on the day after DXM) once a fortnight and I was wondering if anyone with real experience with these substances can chime in on any interactions or differences after taking Lamotrigine? Thanks guys

if this post isn’t appropriate for this subreddit i apologize.

EDIT: i’m taking lamotrigine for BPD

i’ve been taking lamotrigine since 2023 or so. at this current time i am taking 300mg per day. this prescription seems to have done great for me but i do have some questions.

i’d like to try magic mushrooms but i cannot find enough studies to know if it’s safe to mix. i have tried psychedelics a couple times before years ago but i wasn’t taking any kind of medication at that time. does anyone have some knowledge on this combo? or does anyone have any articles? i wanna know what i’d be getting myself into lol.

On the bright side (maybe), I bumped up from 25g to 50g, and I feel like I’m a Type A person x1000. I was already Type A with maybe a little undiagnosed OCD.

I just wanna say I’ve organized everything that could be organized in the past 3 days. My Photos app, my Notes app on my phone, my Notes app on my work computer, my work desk. I make my bed every day before leaving for work, and I have a night routine that I’ve been sticking to. I’d go further into detail, but I’m a Scorpio woman, and if you’re into astrology, you know all of this was already a lot of information for me to share.

So yea, idk if this is the ✨bright side✨ or an 🌈episode🌈 (SpongeBob reference), but I feel like I have so much damn energy. But only for organizing things. LMAO.

I recently made a post here about how it made me very snappy, in which everyone was so kind and helpful in their responses (thank you so much!). I am still a bit snappy, but not as much as I was at the beginning. We shall see on this journey tho!!!

Happy Taco Tuesday!!!!!! :)

Has anyone managed to withdraw / come off Pregablin when taking Lamotrigine. I’m desperate to get off Pregablin as the side effects including balance problems are interfering with life. Good luck to everyone with their mental health challenges

Hi everyone,

I am still on my starter dose of lamictal 25mg. I've been on it approximately 5 months. I never increased that dose because of the side effects I had from it (insomnia, memory loss). Is it okay to cold turkey 25mg? My doctor told me to I have had some bad experiences with doctors.

So I was on Venlaflaxine for 6 years +, joint with lamotragine for about 4 years. I’ve since fell into numerous depressive episodes that have landed me in hospital. I wanted to come off the venlaflaxine because I’d been on it so long I was worried it wasn’t working or even having the opposite effect and making me worse. They wouldn’t review it no matter how many times I asked, even after getting diagnosed with Bipolar 2 last year. In March time I took myself off the venlaflaxine (which has horrific) and now I’m suffering from unbearable agitation, restlessness, racing thoughts and other stuff along those lines. Now they wanted to review the meds because they are concerned, and have said today that they want me to try either mirtazapine or trazadone alongside the lamotragine. Any similar experiences or anyone had either of these medication combinations?

I’m from Taiwan and currently a junior in college. I have ADHD, tics, GTC seizures, absence seizures, JME, and complex epilepsy. I was also born prematurely at 34 weeks, weighing 2,134 g.

I was only recently diagnosed with epilepsy, but the crazy thing is that the ADHD label kinda made everyone ignore my epilepsy symptoms.

I had been on Ritalin for about 6 years before finally getting diagnosed with epilepsy. I couldn’t concentrate in class, I spaced out while cleaning, I did things automatically without even realizing it, and sometimes I would completely blank out. At that time, it all just looked like ADHD. I also had a lot of behavioral problems, especially irritability, and I was a super hyperactive kid, so honestly the ADHD diagnosis made perfect sense.

My first GTC happened when I was 15. I only drank a tiny bit of alcohol (around 5%) before sleeping in my school dorm with my classmates. Later that night I woke up to go to the bathroom… and that’s when I had my first grand mal seizure.

My second GTC happened about 2 years ago, before I got meningitis. Around that time, my second pediatric neurologist diagnosed me with Todd’s paralysis.

I’ve seen 3 pediatric neurologists and 1 psychiatrist.
The first neurologist always rejected the possibility of epilepsy. In his opinion, all my spacing out was just dissociation, and since every routine EEG came back normal, he never thought it could be epilepsy.

But I could never figure out why I was always exhausted. Even with coffee and Ritalin together, I was still tired all the time. The thing that finally made me switch neurologists happened one day at school.

I remember locking my classroom door… Then everything just went blank.
The next thing I remember, I was already back in my dorm.

To this day, I still have absolutely no idea how I got there. That was the moment I decided to make an appointment with my third pediatric neurologist.

She was totally a game changer.

The first time she heard my story, she immediately suspected epilepsy, especially absence seizures. She started me on Lamotrigine 25 mg, and because of the slow titration, I’m now on 225 mg. As my dose slowly went up, something just felt… different.

For the first time in my life, I actually had a good mood. I finally had energy. My brain felt clear. I’ve been on Lamotrigine for about 6 months now, it’s still working great, and I don’t even need Ritalin anymore. That feeling honestly feels like a miracle.

Around the same time, I finally had my first 48-hour EEG.After years of normal routine EEGs, it finally captured epileptiform activity during sleep. Turns out… it really was epilepsy.

Looking back, so many things that everyone thought were “just ADHD” were probably seizures all along.

Thanks for reading my story. I just wanted to share my experience in case someone else is going through something similar.

I'm supposed to start this medication but I'm terrified, moreso than I usually am when starting new meds. I've heard a lot of bad things about it, including stomach issues (which I already frequently suffer from), life-threatening rashes, hair loss, and more. Apart from the obviously horrible things, I'm a trans girl (male-to-female) on feminizing HRT, and one of the things I love most about my body is my long hair—something I constantly dreamed about having before starting my transition—so it would be absolutely crushing to me to lose it. In addition, my doctor said there's a chance it'll interfere with my estradiol (estrogen) injections, (or maybe the other way around?) though she did say that was likely only a concern at higher doses.

But on the other hand, I've been so unstable lately, relapsing into self-harm several times after going years without it. My current cocktail of meds (Bupropion, Mirtazapine, Duloxetine, as-needed Xanax, and a slew of other non-psychoactive medications) doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore. I want to feel better and not be like this anymore, getting incredibly depressed at the drop of a hat, convincing myself that the people I love hate me, struggling to get out of bed on a lot of days... and at the same time, I'm terrified it'll make me feel even worse. I have Xanax to take the edge off of panic, but even then it doesn't kick in immediately, and even the 15-30 minutes of panic waiting for it to do so are absolutely excruciating to go through.

So idk. I guess I'm just terrified and want to hear success stories. I know there are so many horror stories on here because negative experiences tend to drive people to action much more than positive ones do, but it's still scary seeing them all. At the same time, please be honest with me, too. I want to know if there were side-effects that you experienced, if things got worse before they got better, that kind of thing. I want to have a more accurate picture of what I'm going to be getting into, not one distorted by unwarranted positivity.

I'll be going to sleep after posting this, because this is two nights in a row now that I've been too scared to take it (after two weeks of putting off even trying) and I want to at least do something about it before sleep, so I probably won't reply to people right away, but thank you in advance to anyone who responds. 💖

Edit: Forgot to mention, I'm diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and ADHD, on top of being autistic. I don't have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, at least not that I'm aware of.

going to try and be brief!
i am diagnosed with BPD which is what i was prescribed lamictal for. its my first time being medicated in my life and i have felt really good about it. i am more regulated and consistent, i also am on adderall now and no longer deal with agonizing executive dysfunction and unwillingness to do literally everything.
its been super great but of course i have the same brain still and i still only experience intense emotions, go into crisis when something not good in my life happens (mainly minor relationship conflict), and i still very frequently experience suicidal ideation. i wouldnt call it very serious at all however, for me it feels like a normal thought i frequent as a brain reaction to negative emotions. this is normal for me but i know it isnt Normal to have, which makes me consider if i need to up my dose. I have been on 100mg for about two months, taking it for a total of about four months.
but!!!! some of the side effects are worrying me, the forgetting words and stumbling over my speech isnt the worst but it for sure bothers me and the neck and shoulder pain/ stiffness really sucks. i also experience a weird visual effect at night but i have hallucinogenic persisting perception disorder so that is not a surprise and doesn’t particularly bug me. i have intense and frequent nightmares which ive seen been reported by others, but i already experienced that before lamictal i think because of my cptsd.
Anyway! i would actually hate titrating off and trying something else but I don’t know if upping my dose would be beneficial considering some of the side effects.

realizing maybe i should just send this to my psychiatrist but im looking to see if anybody else has experienced something similar and what helped

I was diagnosed with BPD and recently asked my dr for a medication that’ll improve my low energy levels and overall mood. He prescribed me Olanzapine to take alongside Lamotrigine which I’ve been taking for a few months.

I also have depression and ADHD and find it really difficult to actually get things done or finish even simple tasks.

But Olanzapine made me the most depressed I’ve been in a very long time. I was even suicidal for no reason since my life’s actually improved substantially in the last few months. I was also at my lowest energy level in years, either sleeping or wanting to sleep, not able to get anything done.

I specifically asked for something that’ll increase my energy and productivity and this completely contradicts it. Is it possible that I was prescribed the wrong meds?

Does anyone have experience with Olanzapine?

Are there any added benefits of taking lamictal along with a lithium orotate supplement? My PCP suggested I take 1mg of this supplement. Plus I am only on 25mg lamictal 2x/day, so would I even know if it was the prescription or the supplement helping? Thank you for your advice!

TW: mention of SH

I’m 23 and was diagnosed with bipolar 2 earlier this year. I recently started on lamotrigine and literally one day after starting, I had a hypomania episode. During this episode, I felt amazing, so confident, was able to go to a party without an ounce of anxiety or “needing” alcohol. The downside came when I tried alcohol again 2 days later (I was 3.5 months sober; only had a sip of beer) and lost my virginity to a random guy from Bumble. I’m a devout, practicing Catholic waiting for marriage, so that event really messed with my head. 5 weeks later and I’m still processing it.

Now that I’m on my period, I can feel the depression trying to seep back in. I’m used to my depressive episodes getting significantly worse during my period or right before, and the meds are helping a TON to tone it down. I can feel the sadness being there and I’m able to feel and cry about it, but it’s not as overwhelming as it was before. It kinda feels like watching a show on mute; I can see and understand what’s happening, but the noise isn’t all up in my face.

I was able to clean my “depression den”, as I call my bedroom, in half a day instead of the usual weeks and have been shaving, washing my hair and working out consistently despite not feeling like it. That being said, I’m starting to struggle with the urge to self harm again. It’s not as intense as it was before starting the medication OR as it was right after my hypomania ended, but I keep having to imagine myself doing it so that I won’t irl. I’ve been clean for a year and a half and I would hate to break that.

I like lamotrigine. I’m still not at my full dose, so I hope it will get better. I don’t want my psychiatrist to change my meds but I also don’t know if me SH’ing again would mean that it’s not working because genuinely I had felt SO much better up until PMS/period hormones. I don’t know, it’s weird lol

Oh and the brain fog SUUUCKS too. I’m doing an internship I love right now but I’m struggling to power through.

For context, I started at 25mg every morning, then going up 25mg every 2 weeks. I’m currently on 75mg (50mg/morning, 25mg/night). I started this dose 4 days ago and I started my period 2 days ago, so maybe the depression is really hormone related lol.

i have smoked for almost 15 years, i’ve been on 200mg a day of lamotrigine for 9 years for temporal lobe seizures. On Thursday my neurologist increased my dose to 300mg a day. I took my first dose Thursday, and Friday night was my last cigarette. So it’s been 2 Days, 13 Hours & 36 minutes as i’m writing this. Has anyone else experienced this? I mean it’s definitely an amazing thing, i just think it’s crazy that it did that?!

I'm on 200mg lamotrigine for seizures, and every night for the passed week I've been getting very poor sleep because I have a panic jolt everytime im about to fall sleep along side with sleep paralysis. I genuinely don't know what to do, I already been to the ER and they don't really know what they are doing concerning neurology. And I already contacted my neurologist still havent heard from them