i think my biggest mistake/bugbear ever is (one i've mentioned before) where mac calls lithium an antidepressant. that *really* annoys me.
And I don't think he was totally wrong can't it be used to augment other antidepresants?
*tries not to get into lengthy discussion of lithium and its usage!*
it can be, yes, but it's primarily used as a straight forward mood stabiliser in bipolar disorder (mood stabiliser is just as much a category of meds as antidepressant and lithium definitely falls into it, it was pretty much the only one available for 50 years unless you count anticonvulsants which are different again). most mood stabilisers tend to work better at treating either manic symptoms or depressive ones - obviously they stabilise primarily but if you display more or acute manic symptoms you might get a different one than if you display more depressive symptoms, and it's well known (and stated on label) that lithium is best for treating bipolar with actue mania because it tends to bring people down a bit. many many bipolar people can't take antidepressants at all because they induce mania (this includes me, i've had to be sectioned as a result of taking antidepressants, which was fun - not).
sorry, i know that was totally o/t but i've been on the stuff for 10 years (i hate it, it's vile vile stuff, i'm trying to get off it now and it's a very slow process
) and i get quite funny about people getting it wrong. it bothered me because on the whole when csi refer to medications they're quite good at getting it right, and they've mentioned several antipsychotics which i know they got right because i was on those too, so it kind of saddened me that they got that one wrong because really it's a lot more simple than antipsychotics (mainly beacuse there are so many of them).
anyway, [/rant] - sorry....