Change of personality due to lithium?

Hi all,

I have noticed (and had confirmed by others) a weird side effect of my recent medication change.

I went from depakine + antidepressant (moclobemide, MAOI) to depakine + lithium. I notice I am less nice, more easily irritated, more heavy handed in approach to things. I am aware of those reactions, so I control them to a degree, but I don't understand where they come from. My mood chart in the last month is daily rapid cycling from "heavily depressed" to "baseline" and everything in the middle.

Has anyone had this effect on lithium? Uncle Google sez nothing.

Big hugs!

I haven't taken Lithium, but I was impatient, easily irritated and angry until I was prescribed zyprexa. The real problem was that I was sure the people around me were being clumsy and foolish. My moods were all their fault. Of course, it wasn't so.

All I can say is try to hold back the mean stuff, and be quick to apologize when you are wrong.

Talk to your doctor about it.
If the side effect isn't severe, it may be something you learn to live with.

Take care,

I can totally relate to the poster above. I too get irritable at others when I'm up. They are just to slow and don't understand things right.

Lithium doesn't seem to change my personality, but geodon certainly did! I was withdrawn and mellowed out to the max. Like a zombie. Thank god I got off that today.

Now that you mention this, I started lithium, it stabilized the depression completely but a while later I had huge anger issues and paranoia. They eventually went away after a month or so, for the most part, then I told the doctor this and because I had recently felt low mood and sad, he prescribed an increase in one other mood stabilizer and was waiting on levels of lithium to come in in order to increase that as well. I'm still waiting on those results still.

So the anger issues went away and so did the paranoia, but just to share that I noticed this happened too once lithium was added. To be honest I attributed it to a mood swing toward hypomania because it went away and hasn't come back anymore. Neither has my sadness.

I did a bit of searching and found some stuff relating to BP, Lithium and frontal lobe issues.

This paper concludes that higher lithium levels can have some link to frontal lobe issues tho it was done as a geris study apparently (despite the sample group being aged 20-85 ) so might not be totally relevant

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18626002

Tho there is also stuff about lithium having a positive effeect on the frontal lobe so the answer is by no means clear but I thought that paper I posted was quite interesting and might be something to think about as being relevant.

Huge hugs

Cracked

I have huge anger issues, but since starting lithium (800mg) I think it's gotten better. I still have outbursts and I still punch stuff and break stuff, but it seems like it's less often. So, it's actually the opposite of what you're experiencing, Oliveira! I know this isn't much help, but thought I'd leave my experience.