Posted by greywolf on April 25, 2004, at 18:10:08
This question was triggered by a question Psychosage posed about splitting Wellbutrin tabs. In offering my simplistic and probably not very helpful response, it occurred to me to ask you folks for some advice about Wellbutrin myself.
As I have explained in prior posts (mostly several weeks ago), I am BPII with a severe depressive component, and OCD. I had given up on pharmaceutical treatment a few years ago after a couple years of seemingly trying every med on the market at the time. After going it on my own proved not to be the smartest decision I've ever made, I started over with SSRIs last year.
Long story short, the SSRIs had the same intolerable SEs (primarily extreme fatigue and sexual) that had caused me to give up on them before after long-term trials. Same with Effexor. I then tried trazodone and eliminated the sexual SEs, but at the cost of being asleep for a good part of the work day. Since my doctor is not comfortable prescribing stimulants, he asked me to try Wellbutrin again.
The Wellbutrin has been very tolerable after I got over some enhanced anxiety during the first week. I started out at 150/day and now I'm at 300 (150x2/day).
Unfortunately, I have not experienced any therapeutic benefit at all during the last 5 weeks. I've only been at 300/day for a little over 2 weeks, but I see no difference in mood. This is not much different from the lack of therapeutic benefit I've experienced with the SSRIs, but I never bothered addressing that question while I was taking the SSRIs because the SE problems kind of overwhelmed any other consideration.
I have been very depressed for weeks now, but without the expected hypomanic punctuation. Honestly, I think I'm too tired to even find the energy for it, and not having come out of the low for even a couple days of productivity is distressing. Worse, the visible tics associated with my OCD have become much more difficult to control.
Because my doctor has been pretty responsive to switching meds several times over the past few months, but has asked me to give Wellbutrin more of a chance, I've been hanging out with this misery for company longer than I otherwise might. I am not taking lithium this time at my request because of a couple bad incidents while I was on it before, so the focus has been on getting this worsening depression under control.
So, my question for anyone who's listening is this: has anyone had a similar experience with Wellbutrin (tolerating it well, but finding no noticeable benefit)? I've read that you can go with higher dosages, but I'm wondering what the point in that is when I've had absolutely no response thus far.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Anything would be helpful.
poster:greywolf
thread:339922
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040423/msgs/339922.html