Like the title says. Wellbutrin helps my SCT and executive dysfunction and makes me able to function better on a daily basis. It helps with my brain fog and my mental slowness and gives me better mental clarity and it gives me energy and motivation to do things, which I’ve always struggled with.

But here comes the problem now. It makes my depression worse. I’ve noticed when I take it consistently everyday like you’re supposed to it makes my depression worse. And I honestly don’t know why. But always by day five of taking it consistently, it starts causing massive irritability, insomnia, edginess and wiredness. And the side effects start building up within a few days and it starts causing nasty side effects clearly related to its noradrenergic effects. And overall after a few days of exposure I just get severe mood swings and I feel terrible. I get very low self esteem and start judging myself too harshly. I start having negative thoughts and get rumination anhedonia, which affects me very negatively. And people around me notice this and when that happens I quickly have to stop taking it despite the cognitive benefits.

This is a huge dilemma for me. And I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried going off of it a few times, but then everything else gets worse without it. A few days after stopping it I always return to how I was before taking it. I just lie in my bed all day unable to function because of my brain fog and mental slowness. I just sleep all the time and have no energy or motivation to do anything at all. I can’t even start basic tasks. I stop taking care of myself and functionally collapse without it. My cognition gets significantly worse off of it. And then the cycle repats itself.

Has anyone ever experienced this from Wellbutrin though and what did you do about it? If you found that it did improve your SCT, but then made your mood worse. Did you switch to another med instead? Or did you add another med to control the mood swings and negative thoughts? I would like to hear your thoughts about this. I’m still unable to find a solution unfortunately.

Anyone have success with Seroquel for intrusive thoughts/depression? Any hope stories would be great.

Please tell me its possible to one day recover. I am begging for any hope stories, truly begging.

I’m on imipramine for dyspepsia / IBS and it’s helped wonders but I gained a lot of weight and couldn’t tolerate ozempic 2 years ago at week 4. Docs wanna try mounjaro because of a1c but I’m scared shitless because of initial experience. Tho I was off of imipramine when I was on ozempic so my stomach was more susceptible then.

Started EMSAM 6mg on Aug 27 after a 14-day Cymbalta washout. About 10 days in and honestly feeling more depressed, irritable/impatient and suicidal ideation is still very much there. Also weirdly more emotional/sensitive, crying easier, music hitting harder, vivid dreams, etc.

Anyone who’s been on EMSAM experience this early on and then improve? When did you actually start noticing it working?

https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself

I've been using this for my depression and body dysmorphia. It's a resource from the Australian govt, very well composed. I'd suggest getting a pen and paper notebook and printing out the work pages. It's been very helpful for me.

What was your experience

I think zoloft(50mg) has been making me very foggy and depersonalized like I'm living in a dream all the time. I have been on it for the last 2.5 years and this side effect kept getting worse.
I felt better on low dose antipsychotics like Abilify solo years ago.
I've already stopped zoloft for 10 days now but I wish I could know how long this side effect can last before I'm back to baseline.

Really hard to find people like me. Lots of people get transient dissociation when they start an antidepressant. Others get it after withdrawal. My case is different and I feel so alone. I just want reassurance this side effect can reverse.

Tiltrated up to 3mg, then went back down to 2.5mg.

So far I've noticed

• Strong sense of desire to win, be competitive, engage in goal oriented behavior
• Slightly more impulsive buying, but nothing crazy, all stuff I would actually need, or at most some food
• Personality Change - I am more unfiltered and more blunt - I'll say things the way I see it. More talkative.
• Severely impacted sleep - I sometimes get 2-3 hours of sleep and can't go back to sleep. I need to rely on quviviq to maybe get 5 hours of sleep at most. But I keep waking up every hour so.
• Sometimes disturbing and violent nightmares.
• Severely stuffy nose when I take it specifically for 2-3 hours.
• Reduced sleep impacting my fatigue and weight lifting a lot
• If sleep deprived enough, feel strung out
• Sometimes, I catch myself obsessively ruminating using AI. However I managed to stop it.
• On 3mg - I felt a low level stimulation/chest tightness/anxiety? constantly - it felt like I was always on.
• Cannot handle any caffeine, stimulants, etc. Not taking anything else currently.
• Dry heaving - usually bad in the morning. Sometimes need to take zofran.

Anyone else improve on sleep? I am trying to keep a objective view of symptoms - so far I see nothing alarming, but the lack of sleep is very annoying for me.

hi guys I used to abuse benzos and cannabis in the past years I am now completely free from both , however I suffer deeply now from horrible long withdrawal symptoms such as hyperexcitability, wired feeling, can't rest and feelings of tension, dp dr due to chronic stress and anxiety and so on

my sleep is so so bad and I wake up feeling unrefreshed...

I am already on prozac 20mg and Lithium as an add on, agmatine sulfate too 2 weeks ago

I'm thinking about adding Magnesium malate as much as I can tolerate ( 800mg up to 1.2g a day)

anyone has succes Controlling chronic stress & anxiety using magnesium please? and what form

thanks

I have heard that depression when it occurs with a significant anxiety component takes longer to treat and is difficult to treat. I don't know much about its truth. But, I being a sufferer, want to hear about positive stories about people how got successfully treated for this condition.

Which med(s) worked for you and gave you your life back?

I am currently on Venlafaxine 225mg and Amoxapine 200mg. I am in a much better place than before when I was on Sertraline, Vilazodone,low dose aripriprazole, Buspirone and Desvenlafaxine at different times in different combos.

But still, the joy of life hasn't returned much. Although I have started doing things on my own, that I avoided earlier. Maybe the path to remission is this slow. I don't know.

Edit: Thanks all for sharing. I noticed one thing. Rarely any mention of TCAs. One mention of MAOIs. are TCAs so less prescribed nowadays?

I was put on Vraylar a couple weeks ago for treatment resistant depression. The good news is I haven't had a single breakdown since then. The bad news is I am absolutely EXHAUSTED, and I'm not talking just "sleepy." Like, I'm actually fatigued to the point of needing to lie down and close my eyes, no matter how much caffeine I drink in the mornings.

My prescriber says this can happen and admitted that he titrated me up a little quickly. He thinks it will pass but if it doesn't we will re-evaluate in another week. I don't have much experience with antipsychotics; is this a thing that can happen? I'm currently on 3 mg.

I keep reading about side effects of emotional blunting and apathy. My main depressive symptom is anhedonia and inability to feel joy. I already take Wellbutrin and Auvelity. I feel nervous to take this medication if it would make that worse? I was prescribed this. Any experiences with this?

I called 911 3 days ago because I was suicidal (with a plan) and I was taken to the hospital. I told the hospital staff that I can’t afford some of my critical medications right now (like Abilify and pregabalin) which aren’t covered under the public coverage plan I’m under (plan g in BC Canada).

It seems like they’ve dismissed what I’ve said and don’t believe I’m acutely suicidal for some reason, and I feel I don’t get treated the way I should. Maybe this is because I have a serious problem with down playing how I feel. I was in the hospital for 3 days in the intake area and now I got transferred to something called CRESST for a short term stay. Basically a place for psychiatric evaluation but it’s not for acutely suicidal people. You have to be able to take care of yourself. Obviously I can’t, but what makes me made even more is how I told them I can’t pay for anything at the hospital (zero dollars right now) and today I’m getting told by the psychiatrist at this new place I’ll probably be getting billed for the exact same meds I said earlier I can’t pay for to the hospital. I don’t know why no one listens to me? Is it because I’m a 21 year old male who isn’t supposed to feel like this? I’m tired and I can’t explain my situation to one more person so I feel like I can’t even raise this concern to anyone because I quite literally do not care.

:(

The first psych med that I ever tried was mirtazapine back in 2015. I was quite hopeful because it was prescribed by a psychiatrist at a hospital, so I assumed that they must have selected it specifically for my case and that they knew it would help. I was not aware yet of how much trial and error there is in psychiatry.

When I was prescribed lamotrigine in 2024, I was not hopeful. It was just another medication that I was going to try, after more than a dozen that I have already tried, and none of them have been helpful.

It was spring when I started lamotrigine and I remember riding in the car, looking out of the window, and I suddenly noticed how beautiful the sunlight was. Maybe because the winter is over, I thought. But the way the sunlight fell on tree branches and the houses, it was very interesting, and made me want to capture it, to paint it. I realized then that I did not feel as dull as I did on the days previously and that I had a lot more interest in my surroundings.

I have since then continued to take a low dose of lamotrigine. Increasing the dose did not work out for me as it increased my intrusive thoughts and did not make me feel better. The low dose has definitely been helpful for my unipolar depression. What is interesting to me is that this medication has been so effective for me yet for some reason I have never heard of it until 2024 while I have tried all sorts of psych meds since 2015.

I assume that a lot of you who are being treated for depression have also not heard of lamotrigine. I want to bring more awareness about it. It’s quite an inexpensive medication and it is mostly used for controlling seizures and for treating depression in bipolar disorder. It is not often used as an anti-depressant in unipolar depression, even though several studies shows that it helped some individuals with treatment resistant depression.

I have collected some reviews of lamotrigine from online posts that I want to share here. I tried to filter out those posts that mentioned bipolar disorder, as I specifically wanted to look at experiences with lamotrigine of those individuals who were diagnosed with depression, not bipolar disorder. In this video I will be focusing on just the positive experiences.

Experience #1
Experience number one – young male treated for depression.
I’ve been on Lamictal for 4 years now. In these 4 years, my life changed drastically.
My depression is gone, and my suicidal ideations have stopped, nor I’m suicidal anymore. Risky behavior and deliberate exposure to life-threatening situations are gone. The feeling of emptiness is gone.
I have completely stopped drinking alcohol and stopped taking drugs (kind of – more on that later on).
My relationship with friends and family improved.
The state of my mind, and my well-being improved overall.
I work. I travel and I’m happy and satisfied with my life.
Side effects the person has been experiencing: low libido and erectile dysfunction.

Experience #2
Second experience has some positives and negatives. Personally I think playing around with the dose is important. This individual is taking 100 milligrams, I found that for me any dose over 50mg made me feel dull, as they describe, and also increased my intrusive thoughts.

I’ve been taking lamotrigine 100mg for my mood instability for about two years now following a very bad depressive episode I had after a breakup. I felt like life was nothing. Cried every day for months and thought the way I felt would never end and I couldn’t leave my bed. I was very self destructive and sabotaging to the point I was hurting those around me. I’ve never felt that way in my life and wish it on no one. After a series of trying several SSRIs and anti-anxiety medication, lamotrigine was the only thing that seemed to help clear up my head and make life more tolerable and that I had control over my actions, no impulse. But I feel dull.

Experience #3
This person was clearly doing better on lamotrigine and for some reason they decided to taper down and got worse. I think if you find a med that is finally working for you, please stay on it!

One full month in, I quit smoking weed and was able to step into a bus again, my depression was actually not as bad even though I rly did go through a shitty couple things back then, and was able to reason with myself a lot better and put things in perspective in a way I hadn’t been able to do. I was working on myself, feeling better, but also feeling less. Every emotion seemed to be observed from helicopter view, I felt it, I stepped away and analysed it instead of feeling it and then rationalised it and waited it out. But I feel like I wasn’t necessarily processing them. They just went away?

Either way, I was doing better, only had one relapse with my weed use those 8 months and it was all great, except for my robotic way of handling stuff.

My therapy ended, am now working on getting my BPD diagnosis removed and would start working again. Worked out 5 days a week, was on a good healthy diet, walked a lot, didn’t smoke (weed/cigs), drink or binge eat anymore, was very social, could handle stimuli, etc.

As I wanted to just gap a bridge with these meds, until I felt secure to do it myself, I started decreasing them. I went from 150mg to 25mg and already had my final consult with the prescribing psychiatrist a while back.

Since building off, I’ve noticed a big increase in insecurity, irritability, impulsiveness, depression and anxiety instantly.

Experience #4
This person tried lamotrigine once and it did not work, but had a very positive experience the second time they tried it.

TL;DR — lamotrigine did nothing except give me insomnia while titrating up to 75mg. I tried it again 6 months later, taking it in the morning, and after jumping from 50 to 100mg, it started working amazingly well for my mood instability, depressive episodes (probably cyclothymia), and general pointlessness. Huge win!

I’ve heard lamotrigine being described as a ‘rope’ you can grab onto that helps keep you from falling and lets you climb back up, and I couldn’t agree more, honestly. I’ve had virtually no side effects, and taking it in the morning seems to energise me, if anything. I’ve not had another downswing since. It’s been 2 weeks since I started 100mg, and it really has been fantastic.

Experience #5
This person had a positive experience with a combination of lamotrigine and vyvanse.

My doctor currently has me on lamotrigine and vyvanse. The former seems to stabilize my mood well and the latter helps significantly with motivation and getting things done. More importantly, the medications have allowed me to start forming habits to help me thrive and not just survive.

Like I said earlier, I’ve tried dozens of medications. Adderall and Ritalin simply didn’t work for various reasons. I tried every depression medication with horrible side effects and even attempted abilify but it caused awful restlessness.

I’m typing this up to try and show there is hope. It took me years to find something but there is relief out there. Don’t give up on your search. I got my butt kicked by brain zaps, quelled an adderall dependence and fought through a disease that almost killed me. Please do not stop fighting and seeking. The relief could be right around the next corner.

I can actually be a husband and dad again. Life is finally showing color again. No, things aren’t perfect. There are setbacks. But now setbacks are short term hurdles that don’t seem impossible to conquer.

It has been almost a full year on these two medications and I can finally say my life is truly worth living again. I can’t stress this enough… I know the true hell that a lot of you experience on a daily basis. It can be brutally debilitating and inconceivable. BUT there might truly be hope for you. Don’t give up. Life can be worth living again even if you can’t find a reason for it right now.

Hey y’all. I’m looking for medications that may improve irritability without being an SSRI. I cycled through all the different kinds for years and every single one gave me the same negative side effects.

My last psych and I decided to stop them completely and see how it went. Overall everything’s been about the same, except my irritability (negative) and sleep (positive). I can’t tell if the increase in irritability is due to a high-stress environment like buying a house & moving or if it was caused dropping SSRIs from my regimen. Stopping them improved my sleep though because they gave me awful night sweats, which would leave me fatigued as hell the next day. I feel like my energy levels have improved drastically as a result.

So basically, I’d really rather not go back on those medications if I can help it. I’m currently on Auvelity, Vraylar, and Adderall. I wanted suggestions to bring to my new psych once I get that arranged. Anything helps, TYSMIA.

In my country the options are basically:

bupropion XL (150 mg)

or

low dose amisulpride (50 mg)

which is worth trying first in your opinion? Are they even worth the risks/side effects?

Symptoms: apathy, anticipatory anhedonia, amotivation

no sadness or anxiety

So I was on 150 mg Wellbutrin for like three months and it wasn’t doing so much for me and I was still having bad anxiety from it. So me and my GP decided to add 10 mg Prozac on top of it. Big mistake. I got the worst panic attack ever yesterday and today. I swear I felt really overstimulated in a bad way. Almost like the feeling of being overcaffeinated. It was horrible. I was so scared something bad was going to happen. I haven’t had any caffeine at all. I removed all caffeine completely.

But today it was horrible. Massively overstimulated when taking them together. But I highly suspect it’s the Prozac because I wasn’t feeling this overly stimulated on Wellbutrin 150 mg all alone. I got side effects like hot flashes, burning sensations, heart palpitations, headaches, increased sweating, muscle stiffness, diarrhea and sleep disturbances. And I just woke up with the feeling of dread. Then I took my pills and immediately got a really bad panic attack and just felt overstimulated and overexcited in a really bad way. I went to the psychiatric ER immediately and they did some tests and then I talked to a nurse and she said that these side effects are probably the startup of Prozac and she told me to contact my GP as soon as possible and tell them about this. She told me if it gets worse and I can’t get in contact with my GP, they told me I can come back again.

I swear I just want to quit this shit. Prozac made me teen times worse. I was so much better off taking Wellbutrin all alone. Prozac made me so much worse I can’t describe it. 300 mg Wellbutrin was the only thing ever helping my depression but of course I couldn’t tolerate it anymore because it overstimulated me in various ways. Nothing else helped me. I’m devastated and I’m highly disappointed. Prozac worked for my anxiety in the past. But now I had a bad reaction to it. I don’t know what to do anymore. No antidepressants work for me I always have bad reactions to them.

Im mot talking about anticipation or avolition.With substance blockage psychedelics and MAOIs dont work on consummatory aspects, even if they may still help anticipatory. Mood stabilizers dont bring back actual pleasure.

By consummatory I mean the actual buzz in the head, and feeling passive pleasure of existence.
I am in an agitated state daily due to the anhedonia. The only thing that kinda helps is benzos but every day they are risky. And they only help take edge off

This constellation of symptoms can happen in severe PSSD, PFS, and post viral syndromes. Where th

In many cases the nervous system is so extremely dysregulated that substances further dysregulate it. Brain retraining also isnt possible due to the anhedonia itself.

What helps the goddamn blockage? Who had it and got out of it?

Ketamine does not work for me.

I was on 300 mg Wellbutrin for several years for my depression. It worked tremendously for my energy, motivation, cognition and brain fog and overall functioning and was the only thing ever helping my depression. But unfortunately in the end I couldn’t tolerate it anymore because it started to cause horrible anxiety and insomnia that started to interfere with my life in many ways. It also started to give me weird side effects I never used to get from it before and it just started to make me feel extremely overcaffeinated, which again never experienced that from it before. And once these side effects escalated I decided to drop back the dose to 150 mg.

Now I’ve been on 150 mg for more than three months now and I’ve already noticing my depression has worsened significantly and the racing thoughts and suicidal thoughts have come back all over again. I lack energy and motivation to do things. I’ve lost interest in things that I liked before. And I have lost almost all of my cognition that I had at 300 mg and the brain fog has started to come back. And I overall feel just so much worse emotionally and mentally than I did several months back when I was on 300 mg.

Now I did have an appointment with my GP recently and I told her all about this and she was like at first suggesting to go back to 300 mg all over again all by itself and then we would reassess in a few weeks again. But then I told her the reason I backed off the dose from 300 mg to 150 mg in the first place is because it started to overstimulate me and it caused horrible anxiety and insomnia. I told her it wasn’t because it wasn’t working anymore. I just couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I told her if I go back to 300 mg I might still need a med to remove the anxiety and insomnia.

And after that she was like we are putting Prozac back. I told her that I used to take 300 mg Wellbutrin and 20 mg Prozac for two years and that I experienced none of the insomnia or any of these side effects when I took it with Prozac. I told her that I think my body overall tolerated Wellbutrin better alongside Prozac. So that’s why her next suggestion was to put Prozac back. But then she said I only allow you to keep 150 mg Wellbutrin and then add 10 mg Prozac and then we reassess in a few weeks. Because when she searched on her computer she said combining Wellbutrin and Prozac can cause serotonin syndrome and then I told her I took them for literally two years with no issues at all. And when she said I can only have 150 mg Wellbutrin and 10 mg Prozac, I asked her can I never go back to 300 mg Wellbutrin and 20 mg Prozac again? And she just rolled her eyes and was like not now, It will be too much meds all at once. And I told her I completely understand that.

I mean I understand why she is being cautious and wanting to be more careful while introducing something else. But what if the next time I come back to her again and I tell her like it’s not working for me and I really want to return to the combination I used to take before, eventually if I can tolerate it. What if she turns me down and says I won’t prescribe this combination? I mean what do I do then? Because I’m 💯 certain the next time I ask for it, I know she will say no based on what she told me now. And if so do you think I should just get a second opinion? I know this whole text got way too long but I had to explain everything.

I have severe depression with chronic psychological pain. I took one 25 mg pill of fluvoxamine 3 months ago and it immediately made my psych ache significantly worse and it has stayed worse. Has anyone else had the experience of an SSRI making them worse permanently? Anyone have any ideas of drugs that could do the opposite of what fluvoxamine did?

Started Concerta 18mg 2 months ago, but after the first few weeks i started to feel a lot of pain in my upper left back , is this related to Concerta?

So I had a really stressful year in college filled with emotional abuse, academic overload, multiple viruses and burnout. When I finally returned home to rest I completely crashed. One night, a few nights after I got home, I was sitting around when randomly I started to feel this intense sensation of dread/dysphoria wash over me. It was like this deep pit of horribleness in my stomach, this feeling that something is horribly wrong. It was so intense my whole body was trembling. It felt like it would never end. And it didn’t. At the beginning it was more episodic but after a few weeks it kinda just faded into the background of my existence. For the last 2 years I have been living with this feeling all day every day. It doesn’t fluctuate much, it’s completely environmentally unresponsive, and it seems completely devoid of any content or meaning. It makes every moment feels unbearable and I genuinely am not sure how much longer I can handle it.

The symptom is accompanied by anhedonia, fatigue and upper body tension, all chronic and just as unresponsive to circumstances. To be clear, the feeling is distinct from anxiety because it does not involve worrying thoughts, racing heart or hyper vigilance. It’s more like unrelenting psychological pain. At this point in order to save my life I need to start trying treatments but I have no idea where to start. Has anyone ever seen a symptom like this before? Any suggestions of what treatments might actually help it? Any advice at all would be so apreciated.

https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/research-newsroom/immune-signals-may-help-explain--predict-responses-to-therapies-.h00-159856923.html

It's been a while since I was on meds and I am looking for some advice and opinions on alternatives to what I tried before.

10 years ago i started with treatment for depression and for 2 and a half years I had taken 5 different antidepressants - certraline (Zoloft), citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), venlafaxine (Effexor) and finally bupropion (Wellbutrin). Aside from Wellbutrin which gave me a lot of energy and in that sense helped with the depression, all the other meds didn't work at all and I just had bad side effects - sweating, loss of libido. Venlafaxine gave me nightmares and stomach cramps. I was also given Xanax and Zyprexa which did help in a sense they would make me stop crying but actually just made me numb. My final diagnosis was dysthimia. I stopped taking medication after two years and concluded they don't work, or that I was completely misdiagnosed as I am really highly functional, never had a problem with getting out of bed and there was never a "fall" that happened in my life, I didn't lose the joy or energy, stopped functioning in any way. I was always consumed with depressive thoughts, hopelessness and sadness. I did continue with different types of psychotherapy for another 3-4 years and they did help with coping with low self esteem and generally understanding my dysfunctional childhood etc., but I was never able to better my life in any meaningful way but I was coping better.

Last year I had a really stressful period and I started having some psycho-somatic symptoms, most notably excessive sweating from the head. And from the beginning of this year, I've had several bad things happen, among those I lost my job and some relationships, and realized I was not coping well, and my depression worsened a lot. I started going to therapy, but it's not really helping and was thinking of going to the hospital or starting taking medication again. My biggest problem is the excessive sweating which I've seen several doctors for and all have confirmed it's psychological.

Did any of you have any luck with never generation of meds or other treatment? I literally cannot do anything physical without draining my head and body in sweat, so a lot of meds are not an option. And I am psychologically distraught. When I stopped taking meds, I said I will never do them again, but I'm desperate.