Quote from: muuu on February 02, 2013, 04:40:56 PM
I think welburtin and xanax are mostly for anxiety and panic disorders. I think panic disorders and anxiety can partly be because of neurological issues, so there might be a need to continue medication.
The other two I haven't heard of before, but for some, anti-depressants do ease on their depression.
Though, if they aren't helping you shouldn't continue to be on them... or if the benefits aren't worth the side effects.
Psychoactive pharmaceuticals can have very different effects in different people. Because it turned out I was not diagnosed as bipolar beforehand -- going manic after a week on Celexa resolved that mystery, apparently, though I had tried fairly hard to raise that as red flag before agreeing to try the Celexa prescription -- for me, Celexa was something that should NEVER have been prescribed.
No one responsible prescribes SSRIs to bipolar people.
I meant to edit my post a bit before you had beaten me to it...
The Wellbutrin was prescribed (in my atypical case) to serve mainly as an anti-depressant, despite its being atypical, and having some odd properties that put it slightly outside the usual classes of such drugs, largely because the MD knew he no longer had the option to prescribe an SSRI, and needed to be super cautious in general about anti-depressant, and we had seen very poor results from Lithium. Depakote was prescribed to do most of what Lithium is usually prescribed for as a mood stabilizer (read: something to prevent whatever it is that leads to mania) because Lithium literally messed me up too much to tolerate, despite trying to give it a chance over several months.
He was very careful not to add more meds than necessary, which is where my comment was coming from... I have a hard time seeing how someone would prescribe multiples of similar drugs on the theory that "maybe another one would work in combo" -- maybe my psychiatrist was just too conservative, though? And perhaps the caution warranted in my case might be unwarranted for others not dealing with my generally odd responsiveness to many drugs, seen over a long time.
Also, in my case they already had clear signs that throwing many different drugs at me in combinations was not a very good idea... when we changed meds, it was a change, not an addition... one would be tapered off, while something different for the same purpose was added.
My central point is, subjectively speaking, that I felt very little positive impact from any of those drugs, while I have a strong intuition the same would not be true for HRT. Granted, only actual testing (and the kind of monitoring that I can't presently afford) will really answer that question, though. Most of the benefits I felt at all seemed to come mainly from cognitive therapy, self-monitoring and so on... I eventually tapered off all those drugs, and have remained stable, though far from euphoric... but euphoria is not something I expect I will feel until (at least) I've managed to find a way to be on HRT, and get adequate monitoring, something I don't feel is financially or socially possible at the present time.
Sorry for the extensive editing, but re-reading what I first posted seemed to indicate there was way too much room for adding further misunderstanding. One more reminder of why it's probably a good idea not to make too much from individual descriptions of prescription histories, since we do each have a unique body chemistry that may not be at all relevant to other?
