Vraylar and mini episodes?
I don’t know what else to call them. I’ve been on Vraylar since March. It’s working really well for me. Better than anything else I’ve ever been on, since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2004 or 2005. Everything else left me feeling flat with no real emotions and lots of anhedonia, or triggered mania. Now I feel the full range of emotions, but for the most part, just not in the extreme. The exception is this; sometimes I have a day where it completely falls apart. I completely fall apart. Depression so bad I can’t get out of bed, major SI, and I just lie in bed and cry and beg to not exist. This only lasts for a single day.
I want to also add that there are life circumstances that absolutely are contributing to situational depression and very intense levels of stress. I am doing my utmost to manage these situations, but I am currently unable to do anything to alleviate these situations, let alone remove myself from them. All I can do is do my best to cope.
Now, when these major depressive days hit me, there isn’t a trigger that would justify the level of depression I feel. It’s outsized as a reaction to whatever I might be dealing with at the time. As I said above, by the next morning I am fine, and I mean that, not just less depressed, but back to my baseline, which is mildly depressed and decently anxious, which is actually a vast improvement for me, all things considered. Suffice it to say, the day after one of these one day “episodes”, I feel normal again.
I haven’t had a chance to speak to my psychiatrist about this, but I plan to give his office a call and explain what exactly happens, and see what he wants to do about it. I can’t just go on an antidepressant, because none of them play nice with my bipolar disorder. None. I’m on Lamictal as my mood stabilizer, and it works far, far better than lithium did for me. There really isn’t another medication that we can add in, and there’s nothing I can do to change my current circumstances. I am in therapy, and I’ll also be making my therapist aware of this.
Until now I’ve sort of brushed it off as just me feeling the whole range of emotions that I wasn’t able to before on meds, but this is kind of skewing towards extreme and scary at this point. Is it just that I don’t have adequate coping skills for the things I’m dealing with? Is it that I need to increase my dose of Vraylar? I don’t know. I just want to know if anyone else here has experienced anything like this before.
I don’t have “manic” days either. Just these random, not frequent, absolutely overwhelming days of pure despair, then I’m back to normal the following day. I feel like this is surely abnormal, but I don’t have an explanation for it, and I don’t know what to do about it other than what I already plan to on Monday, which is call my psychiatrist and my therapist.
Has anyone else gone through something similar on Vraylar? What did you do? Did it get better? Any advice?