Jedi-Level Personalized Dosing of Lamotrigine (Lamictal) in Bipolar Disorder
A practical guide to a commonly misunderstood drug.
As a child and adult psychiatrist with some expertise in bipolar disorder, not to mention being a person who also has bipolar disorder, people regularly ask me questions about the dosing medications for this condition.
I did kind of asked for it, in that I wrote a whole piece about Lithium dosing. So I decided to pull back the curtain on the next “super specialized” psychopharmacology trick in my bipolar disorder management strategy, which is a clever work around figuring out what dosage of Lamictal (Lamotrigine) might be helpful to which person.
Lamotrigine was developed initially as a treatment for epilepsy. As we now understand, from the work of physician-scientists like Chris Palmer M.D., both epilepsy and bipolar disorder can be understood as metabolic disorders.
“Not only do mental disorders have strong bidirectional relationships with one another, many metabolic and neurological disorders also have strong bidirectional relationships with mental disorders. These relationships provide important clues about the nature of the common pathway that will help us solve the puzzle of mental illness.”1
Lamotrigine is primarily understood to function thusly: