Crazy Meds' Guide to Picking the Right Drugs for You. From People Who Have Taken These Crazy Meds...and SCIENCE!

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The Crazy Meds Guide to Picking the Right Drugs

Let's get the important stuff out of the way:

I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a pharmacist.
I'm not a high school graduate.
Nope, no GED or anything like that.
So you can bet I'm not in any sort of school right now.

All of my knowledge about meds comes from experience and research. I'm putting up the books and websites I use on each page, plus I have general bibliographies of books and websites used.

A site such as this should be your fourth opinion about meds.

First your psychiatrist or neurologist prescribes a drug or drug cocktail.
Then you ask your general practitioner / any other doctor you see regularly about the meds.
Then you ask your pharmacist.

Hah! This is the real world. The first thing anyone does today is go home (or wherever the computer access is) and look stuff up on the web. That's OK. The sequence isn't important, it's the value and weighting to which you give the information you get. Remember that. I'm wa-a-a-a-a-ay down the list when it comes to deciding if a med is right for you. But when it comes to asking your doctor about meds to try, other sites like Crazy Meds (OK, there probably isn't another site quite like this one) are vastly better than drug company ads.

Despite what many of the fearmongers type, I'm not trying to sell you drugs. I am trying to sell you books, shirts, whatever shows up on the Google ads and hit you up for spare change, but I'm not trying to sell you any particular meds. In fact, meds aren't always the answer. For some disorders, especially mild-to-moderate depression, meds are just a waste of time, money and side effects.

So this section is going to try to help you pick the right meds as quickly as possible. The idea is to get you to work with your doctor to use the diagnostic tools available to determine:

A correct diagnosis - the most important thing of all!
The best meds to try first for a very specific disorder. It's too easy to just lump people into broad categories like "depressed" or "bipolar" and start them on the med-go-round. There are many more symptoms that determine which are the best meds to use. Presuming that meds are the way to go in the first place.
What meds, if any, you should be avoiding. Or at least saving for last to try.

So now everyone is going to want the medium-sized answer as to which meds to take.

I'm still working on that. Along with everything else.

But I can give you the short answers and long answers.

First the short answers:

Bipolar 1: lithium
Bipolar 2: Lamictal (lamotrigine)
Bipolar with rapid to ultra-rapid cycling features (cycling within a month to within a couple of days) and/or mixed states: Depakote (divalproex sodium) if primarily manic or mixed. Lamictal (lamotrigine) if primarily depressed with or without mixed states. Usually with an atypical antipsychotic.
Bipolar with ultradian rapid cycling (cycling several times a day): Depakote (divalproex sodium), Topamax (topiramate)or a cocktail of Lamictal (lamotrigine) and one of: Trileptal (oxcarbazepine), Tegretol (carbamazepine USP) or Topamax (topiramate). Usually with an atypical antipsychotic.
Bipolar 6 or NOS with periods of totally over-the-top euphoric mania: Keppra (levetiracetam). Sometimes alone, sometimes with something else. Dosages can be adjusted. Especially useful for seasonal manias.
Temporal lobe epilepsy: One or more of: Trileptal (oxcarbazepine), Tegretol (carbamazepine USP) or Topamax (topiramate).
Frontal lobe epilepsy: Lamictal (lamotrigine) or Dilantin (phenytonin)
Hippocampus-based epilepsy or other stuff with weird-ass symptoms they can't pin down: Keppra (levetiracetam). Sometimes Lamictal (lamotrigine). Sometimes either of those mixed with Topamax (topiramate).
Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome: Lamictal (lamotrigine) and/or Topamax (topiramate).

The long answers you get to look up yourselves, as these are a big part of my online research material:

The University of Texas, a leader of psychiatric research in this country, has published several alogrithms at one handy site, including their ever-popular Bipolar Algorithm Manual UT is probably the leading research center for affective mood disorders in the United States.

Harvard Medical School's Psychopharmacology Algorithm Project - Covers depression, schizophrenia and anxiety.

Neurotransmitter.net - People keep asking me what all the neurotransmitters do. Between this site and Dr. Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology series, these cover your syllabus.

eMedicine Consumer Health - Don't be fooled by the word "Consumer." There's a wealth of serious articles here on neurology.

Plus, of course, all the books in the bibliography and other online sites I use.

The Overlords of the 12 Zernox Galaxies have compelled me through messages in the Sunday Chronicle to beg you for spare change. So if this site has been of use and/or amusement to you, please see if you could

or visit the Donation Page if PayPal isn't your style. Or our Mental Mall to make a purchase. Better yet, if you run a business and want to advertise on Crazy Meds, see our page on ad rates and policies. I'm all about fiscal transparency, so follow the money for full disclosure of my pitiful finances.

Crazy Meds Home Crazy Meds Talk About Antidepressants About SSRIs About Anticonvulsants / Mood Stabilizers About Atypical Antipsychotics About Benzodiazepines About Stimulants Finding a Doctor Sites with More Information Support Group Sites About Crazy Meds Crazy Meds: The Blog

Hey, did you find this page all by itself through Google or some other search engine? Great! But to really appreciate the entire site, you need to start here.

Take care of yourself, and keep taking your crazy meds!

If you still have unanswered questions about this or other medications, including which one is, or combination of meds are the best for you, your best bet is to ask on Crazy Meds Talk. Better yet, if you want to let the world know how they worked out for you and want to help out others in their quest for the correct meds, join the party.
If you want to discuss your issues, I suggest checking out one of the various support groups online.
Otherwise, if you're letting me know about how much you like or hate the site, or need to let me know about medication effects in private, then just drop a note to jerod23 at gmail dot com Honestly, I usually don't have a lot of time to answer e-mail these days. The snide autoresponse message that may or may not hit your mailbox is going to tell you the same thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you one. You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time on their hands have appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their spam, viruses and the like. Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection software authors just go by the domain name, and not the IP address. So I've been blacklisted because of the actions of others. Or the software just doesn't like the domain name because of the "crazy" and/or "meds." Or your question about a particular medication will set off spam flags. So the e-mail just wouldn't go through regardless. Sorry.

Created Monday, February 09, 2004

Last updated Friday, March 04, 2011

Almost all of the material on this site is Copyright © 2003 - 2010 Jerod Poore Except, of course, the PI sheets, those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about. And any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That's usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that's OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I'm cool with it.

All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won't necessarily happen to you. Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don't portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don't be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you'll get every side effect from every medication. Self-prescribing is just as dangerous. All information on this site has been obtained through personal experience, the experiences of my friends, the experiences of people reported on online support groups, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. Know your sources! As such the information presented here is not a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies listed after them in the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may or may not have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Always read the PI sheet that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away. If you didn't get a PI sheet, demand one. Loudly. Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they're paid advertisements, or they're something you should read to make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they're more than one of those things. But what's on those sites is their business, not ours. Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. And from time to time I do look at search terms used to find it in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited.

"Everything is true, nothing is permitted." - Jerod Poore