Re: Bi-Polar II and not ADHD?

[Patte Rosebank]

There’s so much overlap between ADHD, Bipolar/Bipolar II, Depression, and Anxiety that it’s easy to be misdiagnosed. Or to have more than one of these conditions.

As for the drugs, you shouldn’t rule them out completely, but you definitely need to do your homework.

An example:

Effexor (Venlafaxine) and its new cousin Pristiq (Desvenlafaxine) are actually the same drug, just in a slightly different formulation. Wyeth-Ayerst just invented Pristiq in order to mitigate its losses when the patent on Effexor expires, which is very soon. The same drug, with the same nasty withdrawal symptoms. Symptoms which were seriously downplayed when Effexor was first launched, and, I’m sure, when Pristiq was first launched too. (Google “Effexor withdrawal”, for the whole gory story of how Wyeth deliberately mis-stated the actual percentage of users who were suffering withdrawal symptoms.)

How do I know about this? Because, after being on Effexor XR (for Depression, and then BPII) for many years, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and my psych & I decided it would be best if I went off the Effexor before starting on Ritalin. What we’d thought might take a week, actually took over 2 months, with me having to count out individual beads from each of the lowest-dose capsules I took, for the final 3 weeks. And I continued to get the “brain zaps” and teariness for many weeks after I’d fully weaned off.

The topper was, in talking with some of my co-workers about the withdrawal symptoms I was then-having, I discovered that several of them had been on Effexor, and had also experienced those symptoms. If ALL five of us who took it, had major withdrawal symptoms, then it can hardly be described as having a “low risk of dependency”, as Wyeth-Ayerst had claimed.

The Effexor XR was quite effective on my Depression, but I feel very angry that I (and my doctor) were not given the true facts about it, from the beginning.

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