Bipolar Type II Support Group

I am a little upset, maybe not upset, but irritated. I very recently tapered myself off of trileptal, and also put my wellbutrin back up to the full dose I was at before. My last trileptal was last friday, or maybe sunday? Anyway, all this week I have been feeling different degrees of odd signs of withdrawal, or what I assume to be withdrawal. Fuzzy thinking, shaking, sweats, nausea, fatigue, just all around not feeling well. So I looked up "trileptal withdrawal" and this is what I found:

Like any anticonvulsant, if you’ve been taking Trileptal for more than a couple months and you’re up to or above 900mg a day (give or take, depending on other meds you might be taking) you just can’t stop cold turkey if you’re not at the therapeutic dosage for another anticonvulsant that is known to work for you, otherwise you risk partial-complex, absence seizures or even tonic-clonic (AKA grand mal) seizures, despite your never having had a seizure disorder before! The risk is worse if you’re taking a lithium variant, and/or most antidepressants, especially Wellbutrin (bupropion hydrochloride).

Maybe pdoc was not aware of this. Granted, I did take myself off the trileptal without her guidance, but I went very very slowly getting off of it. I just wish I had known about this from the start because I would not have taken it.

Well, tomorrow I will see my pdoc and figure things out. Thanks for reading my babble...

Some times slowly means over a month to 6 weeks, not over a week.

It was slower than just one week. Not sure exactly how long. Not a month obviously, maybe two and a half weeks.

I remember going off Lamictal (also and anticonvulsant) and we did taper off pretty fast. The result was probably the worst withdrawal I had ever been through. I swore I would never go back on this med. but I did because its the only one that works for me.

Many times we start these meds not thinking of stopping, we usually focus on the side effects and how it may help us. Even though I read about my meds I tend to skip over the withdrawal when going on something new. I do research when I feel I might be going off of any med that I've been on more than a month.

If we were to base our treatment on information about withdrawal we probably wouldn't take anything. All of these meds are very powerful, we don't notice because of our condition and a lot of times we feel better on them. A "normal" person would be knocked for a loop on meds we take. pdocs are becoming more aware of discontinuation syndrome but many of them don't know unless we make them aware. Stopping any of these meds can be dangerous. There are class action law suits for some of the meds we take. There are a hand full of people that have developed serious illnesses because of some meds esp. anti-psychotics. If we read the black box warning that comes with a med or read it on line many of them clearly state they can cause diabetes, Tardive dyskinesia, weight gain etc. Rarely do patients read the warning before starting a med. All we want is to get better sometimes at the cost of another part of our health. It's a trade off many of us make to live a better life now, we'll deal with the future when it gets here.

I went through the same problem as Rick with lamictal. It was awful. It's good you're going to the dr tomorrow. Good luck with that.

Post edited by: InvisibleMe, at: 06/29/2012 05:48 AM

I too went thru hell getting off lamotrigine, i had to stop cold turkey because i developed a rash and the withdrawls were so bad i missed a week of work. But now back on as the rash never went away so its something else.