Posted by bleauberry on September 16, 2008, at 17:39:35
In reply to shall i ask for seroquel back and lithium *NEW*, posted by Jeroen on September 14, 2008, at 16:08:13
> shall i ask for seroquel back for psychosis
> and lithium *NEW*Statistics for lithium in treating just about anything really aren't very good. But yes, anything besides an antipsychotic is, as you know, something I think is in the right direction. That being said, my gut tells me an antidepressant+antipsychotic combination would be better. I was going to post it here but it was too large, but at pubmed.com there was a lady with psychotic depression who was not responding to her antipsychotic alone so they added an antidepressant and still didn't respond and then they added Ritalin to it all. I thought how weird. Isn't ritalin going to worsen psychosis? Just the opposite. She got well enough to finally leave the hospital and was still doing well a year later. I can understand doctors giving ritalin for depression, but when psychosis is a factor? That was weird. And how about with an antipsychotic? Wouldn't the antipsychotic just block the effects of the ritalin? Wouldn't they just cancel each other out? Apparently, once again, armchair theory quarterbacking often doesn't work like we would like. I don't know what those doctors were thinking, or if it was just a lucky guess, or if they were so stupid they didn't even figure ritalin would be a strage brew for a history of psychosis, or if they had some good reason to try it, or what, but hey, it worked. That's all that matters, right?
Anyway, just one example to show you how someone else who was in the hospital a long time with psychosis and depression got well on a strange mix of meds, with only one of them being an antipsychotic. Will lithium be the one for you? I don't think statistics are in your favor with it, but anything is possible. And it makes more sense than staying in the limited world of antipsychotics by themselves.
Antidepressants of the TCA or Remeron family, Memantine, Ritalin, Glycine...these are all things that have worked in combination with an antipsychotic with people very similar to you, so you might do well to write these things down and remember them. You might do well to hunt for some of these pubmed cases yourself and show them to the doctors treating you. Give them some ideas that have worked for other resistant cases. They are probably just as confused as you are right now and would probably welcome some ideas like that, especially since these success stories in psychotic depression came from various psychiatric hospitals around the world.
poster:bleauberry
thread:851989
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080915/msgs/852346.html