Also a Nirvana song and periodic element.

Anyone here ever taken this, known someone who's been on it?

Eating Noddemix wrote:Also a Nirvana song and periodic element.

Anyone here ever taken this, known someone who's been on it?

Bobrick?

A friend of mine has been on it for the past eleven years, and he tells me he will probably be on it for the rest of his life. A bad pill on a lads' holiday in Tenerife triggered a brain alteration that badly effected his personality. He started at university within the month and within a fortnight his parents were called to pick him up. I don't know what behaviour instigated this and have never had the heart to ask. In the gap of two months that made up our first terms at university, he had gone from a scrawny slip of a lad to a bulky, slurred, disorientated and intensely twitchy man. I was stunned the first time I saw him when I got back.

After a year of spells in and out of university and psychiatric clinics, his doctors had worked out that he needed a mood stabiliser and had prescribed the appropriate dosage of lithium. This did improve his condition a lot, though his speech was still noticeably slower than before the breakdown, and the extra bulk remained.

I must confess, I don't know what exactly has afflicted him, but he refers to them as manic episodes. He has suffered on and off from these episodes for most of the past twelve years, all coinciding with his trying to wean himself off the lithium. These episodes have led to his being suspended from university after going missing and being found smoking heroin in the local gypsy camp, deported from Holland, rescued by his parents from near insane depression in London, and being rescued by his brother-in-law when he went off to teach in India and, well, I'm not sure what happened, but from the weird emails we were getting, I think it involved getting ripped off and a near shotgun wedding with a girl whose hand he had held.

During this period, we (his friends) have kept regular contact with him, and sometimes he has been fantastic company, and sometimes he could drive you up the wall with obsessive and increasingly agitated circular arguments about "how we didn't understand". Which, to be fair, we didn't.

After the India episode, he finally decided that quitting lithium inevitably led to mania, and for the past two years he has really done well, after a decade of drifting, drops into alcoholism, and constant anxiety.

He's on a teacher trainer course now in Barcelona, is happily teetotal, his speech has returned to the same speed it was before he went under, and he has lost all the weight that he gained: he looks and sounds great.

In the case of my friend, lithium is NOT CRAP, as it allows him to live without fear of lapsing into another manic episode. I know nothing else about this drug, but it has helped my friend immeasurably.

Why is it every person I've known who is on these types of meds, they are constantly trying to get off them? Or they'll just stop taking them out of nowhere and flip out and end up in a hospital....then get more meds, take them for a few weeks everything will be cool then they will stop again and go wacko again over and over.....I know people who like night and day are so much better when they are on their meds, they say 'I feel so much better now that I'm on these' then a few weeks later they'll be acting loopy again 'oh I stopped taking those' and they can never really give me a reason as to why aisde from 'oh I hate taking them' or something

NOT CRAP, please just take your meds everyone

Marsupialized wrote:Why is it every person I've known who is on these types of meds, they are constantly trying to get off them? Or they'll just stop taking them out of nowhere and flip out and end up in a hospital....then get more meds, take them for a few weeks everything will be cool then they will stop again and go wacko again over and over.....I know people who like night and day are so much better when they are on their meds, they say 'I feel so much better now that I'm on these' then a few weeks later they'll be acting loopy again 'oh I stopped taking those' and they can never really give me a reason as to why aisde from 'oh I hate taking them' or something

NOT CRAP, please just take your meds everyone

Because the side effects suck, and to the person who has been leveled out by their meds, it is a much different mental place from when you are manic or depressed or whatever you affliction is. It's obvious you need your pills when you feel like nothing matters because your life is a dream or sit for hours with lethal impliment in hand. When you are actually able to pay bills, communicate with your wife, refrain from yelling at your kid, enjoy entertainment without guilt, etc. it's easy to wonder if the side effects are worth it or necessary.

Note: anyone offended by my use of the second person in the paragraph above can look at it as if in first person and I won't be mad at you.

It helped Spike Milligan not kill himself - not crap.

I'd be interested to hear more about the side effects, though surely they vary from person to person.

Eating Noddemix wrote:I'd be interested to hear more about the side effects, though surely they vary from person to person.

I think not being batshit insane is a common one

Eating Noddemix wrote:I'd be interested to hear more about the side effects, though surely they vary from person to person.

Well, it would be nice to be able to successfully masturbate within, oh, an hour without feeling like I'm going to have a stroke.

iembalm wrote:

Eating Noddemix wrote:I'd be interested to hear more about the side effects, though surely they vary from person to person.

Well, it would be nice to be able to successfully masturbate within, oh, an hour without feeling like I'm going to have a stroke.

Really?

Shit.

I was diagnosed as bipolar today and the doc (a highly intelligent man who specializes in treating bipolar disorder) prescribed lithium. He said it wouldn't have sexual side-effects. And unlike depakote it wont make me gain 30lbs. in a month. I guess I'll have to wait and see, be my own guinea pig.