Is it possible for antidepressants to make a person, who is not bipolar, manic?!

Is it possible for antidepressants to make a person, who is not bipolar, manic?

Let's say it was Paxil that did it. Would another antidepressant such as Zoloft or Prozac be okay?

My first mania was triggered by an antidepressant. I was cyclothymic before that and have had other manias since, not from an antidepressant. So I clearly have bipolar disorder, even though it wasn't diagnosed until an antidepressant triggered a mania in me.

That happens regularly, mania from an antidepressant in someone who wasn't previously diagnosed as bipolar. How many of these patients are in fact bipolar and how many aren't? Who can say? How many years of follow-up are enough to say someone who never has another mania isn't bipolar? I never have seen an article pretending to make that claim. It's uncertain.

If someone has had a mania, he or she is liable to be put on mood stabilizers which makes it safer to try an antidepressant again. For years I was on Wellbutrin with my lithium without any problem from it.

How long does one need to be on a mood stabilizer after a mania induced by an antidepressant with no other indications of bipolar disorder? There's no scientific answer to that, no study with enough follow-up to say. There's trial and error that doctors do. There are risks to assuming this is not bipolar disorder. This is what Dr. Phelps at BipolarWorld says on the subject:

http://www.bipolarworld.net/phelps/ph_20...

I am a retired neurologist. I once had a patient who had an episode of localized weakness suspicious for MS, but he never had another episode, so he could not be diagnosed with MS. He eventually died from something else. At autopsy he certainly had MS, with multiple plaques on the brain, but only this one had ever caused symptoms.

There is no autopsy for bipolar disorder, no way to know definitively that this person did have bipolar disorder while that person had a different mood disorder. As with MS, a person might have one episode of mania in a lifetime, and therefore not be diagnosed as bipolar, yet might turn out to have the right genes for bipolar disorder, whenever they figure those out, or some neurochemical trait that no one knows how to measure now.

Until we know that kind of information about bipolar disorder, no one can say with certainty that any people who have a mania provoked by antidepressants aren't bipolar. Instead a psychiatrist can work with such a patient on meds, knowing the risks both ways. Some would be like Dr. Phelps in that link above. Some would do it differently. There's no single right way to do something that's trial and error.