’SCRIP TRIP
Lithium kept her manic episodes in check — until its side effects nearly killed her
WHEN writer Jaime Lowe says she’s fine — “I’m good now, thank you for asking,” she tells The Post — it’s not small talk, but a small miracle. Lowe, 40, has bipolar I, a mood disorder that causes severe manic episodes marked by euphoria, godlike confidence and delusion. The Brooklyn-based scribe was diagnosed at 16, when the condition caused her to suffer a psychotic break.
“I was Jesus, I was Bob Dylan, I was Hitler,” she writes in her new memoir, “Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind” (Blue Rider Press). She heard voices and hallucinated horrors; she saw the world as suddenly at war “with secret spies and reborn Nazis and people in masks.”
When her parents forced her to get professional help, Lowe was prescribed lithium, a psychiatric medication commonly used to treat bipolar disorder and depression.
“For years, I took it, thinking, ‘This works,’ ” Lowe says. And it did: She went to college, moved to New York and built a career as a writer. As long as she took those light-pink pills, she was fine.
Unfortunately, the drug that kept her mind well wasn’t doing the same for her body.
In 2014, at a routine checkup, Lowe’s doctor immediately sent her to the emergency room. Her blood pressure was through the roof, and further tests revealed an urgent problem: Lowe had incurred serious kidney damage, an uncommon but known side effect of prolonged lithium use.
Lowe had a choice: She could look into having a kidney transplant or she could try to switch medications.
Both options terrified her. She knew that changing her meds would have her “secondguessing everything”: her moods, her reac- tions, her very sanity. Still, she decided a new prescription was the lesser evil.
There are a few major medications used to address the manic side of bipolar disorder. First up for Lowe was Depakote, which also doubles as an anti-seizure drug. She lasted six miserable weeks. “It was awful,” she says. “I was crying a lot. I felt really outside of myself . . . I wasn’t right.”
From there, she moved onto Tegretol, another anti-convulsant. On this one, Lowe felt like her old lithium self. “I thought, ‘OK, this is my next medication,’ ” she says.
But when she went to her next checkup, her doctor found that she had a toxic reaction to the drug in her liver, and she needed to stop taking it immediately.
Having yet another medication X’ed off Lowe’s list devastated her — especially because that just about exhausted her best treatment options, and her doctor was encouraging her to go back to Depakote.
Reluctantly, she decided to give it another shot. But this time around, she was pleasantly surprised. “It was way better,” she says. She thought her initial reaction to the drug had been psychosomatic: “Maybe it was all in my head?” But after a few long phone conversations with her pharmacy, Lowe discovered that she had received a different version of the same brand-name drug, this one designed to release more slowly.
Lowe, who has now been lithium-free since January, considers herself incredibly lucky that she was able to parse the difference between the two Depakotes and thinks that doctors need to do a better job of educating their patients about the medicines they’re taking.
“One of the biggest hurdles of treating mental illness is getting people to take medication and convincing them that it’s actually going to help,” says Lowe. “Because so much of the time it doesn’t help — that’s true. But a lot of the time, it does.”