Psychiatric help symptoms and conditions

***IF YOU ARE PLANNING ON STARTING FEMCON FE PLEASE READ THIS FIRST***
I am 31 years old and have been on contraceptives for 15 years. I have endometriosis and have very bad periods. In the past I have taken several different brands of the pill and have had no side effects, aside from a very occasional migrane, but they have not controlled my pain/periods...so we tried femcon fe. I stopped taking it today after three months when i realized that the horrible things i have been going through match up with what all of the other ladies are saying here. The first day i had such pain in my breasts that my bra itself almost brought me to tears, then came the nausea. I actually took three pregnancy tests because i was sick at the same time everyday. I started vomiting with painful abdominal cramping off and on and not putting two and two together i was about to go and have a GI thinking it was an ulcer or worse! then i started to notice the weight gain, skin issues - not pimples but splotches, Then came the depression, rage and mental cloudiness. I started having trouble concentrating or even listening, was experiencing horrible anxiety to the point of near rage, and even having some trouble slurring my words and having significant "blank outs" where i couldn't find my words or remember things. I was depressed enough to consider psychiatric help/meds...this is NOT me!! Insomnia, crazy vivid dreams and nightmares, trembling, irrational fears and reactions...these are serious side effects that were doing nothing but getting worse. Today i got a migrane and could not stop vomiting, that is when i sat in fear that there was something terribly wrong with me and it hit me...THAT DAMNED PILL!!! I am not kidding, i really thought that i was deathly ill. stomach cancer?, a stroke? i thought, what the hell is going on here?!? That's when i found this site and thanks to you ladies i am no longer afraid that i am crazy or going to die! immediately, i called my OB who has advised me not to take another femcon, obviously, and said that everyone reacts differently and this is not something that will "level out." If you are having these issues CALL YOUR DOCTOR!!! Please don't let yourself get to the point of total misery that I stupidly did...there are HUNDREDS of pills out there that will not do this to you!!! I wish i would have realized this sooner i thought it was all coincidental having been on so many different pills and never having even a tiny pimple of a side effect. Please do you research and please don't continue taking this pill if you are having problems with it...it is not for everyone and an irregular period is nothing compared to the sheer hell i have been going through to have 10% less cramps and a one day shorted period!!
Jacqueline B.

Hi. I went on Lamictal April 2007 after being diagnosed w/ BiPolar. The key issue that brought me to the psychiatrist to begin with was acute depression following a divorce, move cross country, losing my job and my only son going off to college. All the big stress factors - short of death in family. Nonetheless, I was nervous that one year after all these crises that I was, if anything, feeling worse. I had been able to handle all the changes during them, but now that they were over all I wanted to do was sleep all day.... Anyway, I had been on Paxil for years re anxiety, and my psychiatrist decided to keep my on the Paxil till I tolerated the Lamictal, then get me off the Paxil..... Well, the 20 mg of Paxil and the 100 mg of Lamictal worked great, I thought; the Lamictal really raised the bottom.... BUT, apparently Paxil fuels mania, so after a few months, I was taken off the Paxil completely and my Lamictal went up to 200 mg. Almost IMMEDIATELY upon going to 200 mg Lamictal my ankles / feet / legs got enormously swollen. Plus, I noticed that my hair started to fall out // thin out.... Plus -- and I don't know if this is the Lamictal or the absence of the Paxil, but I sob uncontrollably almost 24/7. The sobbing and anxiety and sense of dread and sadnessness has persisted even when the Lamictal was dropped to 100 mg and the shrink added first Clonazepam .5 mg, then when that wasn't calming me, changed me to 1mg Xanax -- each as needed. The Xanax isn't helping me either, and now I also feel paranoid. So, in short: Lamictal at 200 mg makes my feet / ankles / legs swell or suffer edema; Lamcital as low as 100 mg makes my hair thin out; and either the Lamictal or the loss of the Paxil or these anti-anxieity meds (Clonazepam or Xanax) are making me paranoid, profoundly sad and depressed, panicked, anxious, stressed out and, most urgently, make me sob uncontrollably 24/7... My shrink says that we should use anti-depressants with bipolar, and that Paxil fuels the mania, but I tell you, I'd rather be manic and screaming at everyone than so depressed that I'm fearful and sobbing constantly.... Any answers out there: Any anti-depressants for your bipolar?

Responding to the latest poster.

No, no improvement for me in 6 months.

So sorry to have to say that. For you and I and the rest of us.

I just came back from a rheumotologist who has done many, many tests on me. I shared with him my belief that this all started within 1 or 2 days of taking only one medicine ( and after not taking "any" other medicine at all for 1 or more years before this ) and that is Levaquin.

Immediately the subjcect of psychiatric help was brought up by him and his feeling that it is very easy to read other peoples emotional responses such are posted on this board into your own situation.

He did give me the time and chance to at least present the idea to him regarding the "fact" that all of this began shortly after I started taking my 6 day dose of Levaquin. When I told him about the thousands of "exactly" matching experiences by you other posters, he shifted in his seat and stopped me and told me what I just recounted in the previous paragraph.

After repeating individually all the medical tests that have come back negative on me and repeating his hope that I get back on anti-depressants, he then shook my hand with a look of pity on his face and said something like, I hope that my allowing you to unload your concerns on me helped.

I am 54. I am not so ignorant that I don't understand and appreciate the importance of relying on well tested, scientifically solid and proven facts when it comes to making decisions about almost everything. But there is something wrong here. I can sense it. And yet no doctor will give "any' weight to what you and I and others are honestly pouring out here on these boards.

The "fact" that thousands of people are saying the same thing after almost all of them report only one thing in common ( the taking of Levaquin and or Cipro and usually just this one medicine alone ) is simply emotionally unstable nonsense motivated
by people who are suffering from something other than Levaquin or Cipro side effects and proabably mental in nature.
And their physical testing results are thier God of logic here.
If 500,000 people were reporting what we are reporting, and they didn't have the 30 different clinical test results to back this up they would probably say this was some form of mass hysteria.

It is a very sad and actually frightening statement about the almost crazy mind closing mentality of our medical community and their educational conditioning.

Of course there aren't many studies and clinical test results of people who have had such serious side effects like ours from Levaquin and Cipro. These powerful antibitoics haven't been around for decades and there is proabably 100,000 times more money behind trying to prove these drugs work and are fine and "not" that dangerous, than the monetary amounts and motivations behind trying to show that they are indeed much more danagerous and damaging than anyone will admit.

My depression and anxiety took off "after" I started taking Levaquin, not before! My leg weakness and soreness and other limb pain is "not" coming from my depression. And all these other unprecedented and extreme cases of insomnia, itching arms and scalp, weird wincing pains, stomach problems, shuddering, tremors, weird pulse rates, incredibly heightened sensitivity to cold and then immediate turns to feeling too hot, uncoordinatided gate and a few other carzy symprtoms started only after 1 or 2 days of a 6 days dose of Levaquin for me. And I have never, ever experienced anything like this before in my life ( with the exception of a few panic attacks, like who hasn't had those ) until I started taking this Levaquin.

I have written to so many major media outlets asking them to start looking into this situation of ours and so many like us. I will "never" just cave and accept my devastatingly changed life by simply accepting every doctors explanation that I am just a loon because their test results aren't shwoing them any results that would explain this.
WRITE...write to everyone you can about this. There is massive money behind trying to make you believe there is nothing wrong here. Stand up and be courageous here. You may have to take anti-depressants in the search for the truth and cure...but what other choice do we all have? JB