Q: Are Diet and Exercise Enough
I recently quit all my meds.Depakote,Trazadone,effexor,and
alaprazom.I almost died.I was so sick.Now I feel physicly better but I am
feeling deppresed and out of control.Is this just the traces of med. leaving my
body?Do I have a chance in hell beating this naturally with exersize and
diet?The meds make me so ill...I can't take it.
Dear Ms. R' --
Ouch, that must have been rough. Stopping alprazolam alone, from a dose
any greater than about 1mg daily, can cause "withdrawal" that can be
really hard to handle: anxiety, agitation, difficulty sleeping, for
example. Stopping an antidepressant quickly (like in less than a month,
and often I'll take four months to stop) is a destabilizing thing in many
people, and can "cause" symptoms to be more severe. The same is
probably true for stopping a "mood stabilizer" like Depakote; I would
certainly do that slowly if headed that way.
So you might consider, next time, talking with your
doctor about your problems with the medications. Even if you were to tell
him/her you were determined to stop the medications and just want to know how to
go about it best; and hopefully you could also emphasize that you want her/his
support after you've completed the project, including looking at alternatives --
maybe you have a doc' who could hear this and not send some tremendously
rejecting message?
In any case it is possible that some of the bad stuff
you were feeling was coming from the antidepressants in there (Effexor, and
maybe the Trazodone although I'd be less sure about that part). So it's possible,
though I wouldn't turn around and try to test this because there are
alternatives nowadays, that the Depakote wasn't necessarily the problem itself
and that it could still be a useful part of your medication mix
someday.
If you do indeed have bipolar disorder, then you may
need to use caution if someone wants to give you an antidepressant. They
can clearly make things worse, and thus require more medications to control mood
instability, and the more medications can then become a problem in themselves
(e.g. adding alprazolam and Trazodone to Depakote).
So now that you're back to square one, especially if
you used to have "rapid cycling", you should ask your doctor about
trying mood stabilizers alone, starting with one alone and making sure it's not
causing anything to be worse; then cautiously adding another making sure as it
goes up that it's not making things worse either (this can be tricky to figure
out when your mood is cycling! -- is it the med', or you? Patience and
repeating steps if necessary can help here).
Here's the list
of "mood stabilizers" people are using these days. Make sure
your doc' has checked your thyroid,
too; or ruled out Polycystic
Ovarian Syndrome if you have had a phase of tremendous weight gain for no clear
reason. Finally, yes, exercise in particular can be very helpful (but may
not be enough alone).
Dr. Phelps
Published October, 2001
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