I recently served time, almost three weeks, at a hospital for what I’m being told was Depakote-induced hyperammonemic encephalopathy. I have tried a few times, but I still cannot memorize or pronounce it. I also learned that the word encephalopathy means “brain disorder”, brain disease or illness, that involves alteration of the “brain structure”. Couldn’t we have adopted this word/name for mental illness? It has such a dignified ring to it?This “side-effect” basically meant that there was excessive ammonia in the brain due to Depakote or valproic acid. I may be simplifying that, there are a few articles on the ‘Net about this. The exact quote from the linked article is: “Typical symptoms for this type of metabolic encephalopathy include confusion, agitation, disorientation, insomnia, hallucinations, picking at bedclothes or in the air, twitching, and asterixis (also called “liver flap”, where your hands twitch when holding your arms outstretched as if you were stopping traffic). If an EEG is performed, this usually demonstrates a diffuse encephalopathy.” It is amazing to me that they have mentioned “picking at bedclothes”, because I was doing that – not in a crazy sort of way, with great speed or obsessively, but still something I noticed as uncharacteristic of myself.
With Lithium, after several years of usage, I struck out when it started affecting the kidneys. Fortunately, that was reversible once I discontinued Lithium. I’ve been on Depakote for several years now. I’ve been taken off of Depakote, and almost all of my other meds too, and now placed on a combination of five other meds. Here we go round the “malberry” bush. So far, no serious side-effect. The slightly more visible tremor than what Depakote exhibited – I am willing to accept and treat as minor inconvenience. I have also started feeling better, more active than before – it’s strange how the depth of depression swallows one into it and creates a reality of its own, and when a bit of improvement finally shows, there is an amazement that one is/was capable of so much more and it was all hidden not too far under the surface and yet it was so far away, so long forgotten…
I had the rare side-effect of blurred vision with Tegretol, which I tried for just a few days back in the ’90s and had a panicky day at work, where I had to use the hand rails to navigate to the Men’s room and get a friend to assist me out of the office building. It seemed so real and permanent, and not as a side-effect of the medication. That’s the reality we deal with, when it comes to side-effects. It’s every bit as serious as the main effect, and doesn’t necessarily go away in a few weeks as claimed. In fact, the side-effect happened after over 15 years of using the med, and possibly after an accidental double-dose of the med on a night, not necessarily the night before or even anytime close to when the hospitalization was needed.
There are many more struggles I have had with side-effects, but there is one category of people I actually have more sympathy for than ones similar to myself, and that is for people who opt for ECT. I was recommended ECT several years ago and I am glad to this day that I chose not to have it. I know that my bias is not an educated one or anything and there are probably people who have positive experiences with ECT and speak favorably of it, but it is still a leap of faith for me to think that the grey cells can be just plugged in like a juice mixer at one of those corner pomegranate and sugarcane juice stalls in New Delhi and put on max spin and served back to you for test runs to figure out how much memory loss and other Macrosoft reboots show up on your eye-windows.
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