Lithium side effects

My 57 year old husband has recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  The psychopharmacologist added Lithium to the Prozac that he was already taking.  He has been on this combo for almost 1 month and feels lousy everyday.  Says he is "fuzzy", tired, sweaty and anxious.  Spends entire days in bed which is not like him at all.  Can anyone give me their personal feedback about Lithium side effects?

[Vikkttoorr99]

Hi, I'm 44 and was diagnosed about 7-8 yrs ago. Don't remember exactly. I took just about every psychpharm drug that was available but I didn't try all of the combinations. I have boploar 2/ADD and some learning disability. Paxil made me a kind of zombie. Zoloft made me a much more intensely out of it zombie. Prozac, I really didn't notice much of anything with that. (I'm remembering these out of order). I tried nardil which I didn't notice anything with either. Celexa, Lexapro, (I thought I'd never forget them) they were almost like being on nothing. There are others but none of them really did anything for me. So my doc put an antipsychotic in the mix. That's when things started happening but it was tricky. The mix has to be just right or it just makes things, possibly, worse. At first it was zyprexa but the doc decided that geodon was better. It wasn't. Risperidone was next but it didn't seem to do anything either and the dose was quite high. Seroquel was next. Oh good ol seroquel. For me it was one of the worst things. It made me 10X whackier than without it. Nothing seemed to work and it had been YEARS trying to find the right meds, the right combo and the right dose. The meds, the combo and the dosage are always changing. Even if they don't change that's still something to be looked at. There were times something started working and by the month or couple of weeks I was right back where I started. Ok so...finally I went to another doc cuz I moved. She put me on lamictal and lithium. It was awesome!!! It took a while to ramp up the lamictal (I'm on a very high dose) but it was definitely worth the research.  I had some trouble with anxiety at times and for that when i get really bad I take a very small dose of risperidone. On high doses lithium robs you of some of your thinking abilities. You get forgetful. It's almost as though you got a blanket over your head so stimulous doesn't get through as quickly is it did. If he just started taking it, in my meds "research" if the meds didn't make me worse I'd stay on it for a month. Sometimes it takes your head that much time to figure out what's going on. I was on a high enough dose that I got hand tremors but they weren't noticeable unless I did things like that game Operation. I had dry mouth and i didn't sweat much which is very bad if you exercise and are in the heat while you're doing it. Have to watch that! It's good to have your lithium levels checked frequently to see if the dose is good. Sometimes with the meds it's just a matter of dosage. It does take time to find that out though. The only drug I took that I will not say that it was good to wait a month (which is not a hard or fast rule) was Abilify. That made me VERY belligerent, aggressive, angry, sped up, beyond irritable, pinching the walls, screaming and I ended up cutting myself just to get my head under control if that makes any sense. It was a very difficult 2 days! The dose of lithium I'm on now is 450mg; then 300mg lamotrigine (lamictal). I haven't had any anxiety bad enough to take a risperidone in almost a year. I never got an anxious feeling from the lithium so I can't say anything about that. What you both need to do is pay attention to as many things as possible in your lives. It's very important to identify as many variables as possible that may be contributing to his symptoms. It may not be the meds. A mood chart is helpful. I used to have a URL for a good free one. I'll try to find that. This time in your lives is for you to become scientists, mainly researchers. In whatever event you're studying it's important to gain as much control over your situation as possible at first so that it's easier to spot things. Then it gets easier. I'm not opposed to blabbing on about this if you would like me to. So this doesn't get mile long I'll end here. Sorry about mispellings and such. I'm on my phone and the field won't let me scroll. Take care.