I’m in my 64th year, and have been a clinician since 1978. A couple of years ago I was hospitalized briefly because a lung infection looked like it might have been TB. I contracted a brand-new hospital related disease that’s outraced all others, but is yet to be publicized (the FDA takes so long). It’s called C-Difficile. It damn near killed me. Since then I’ve been sent to a variety of specialists, been taken by paramedics to various hospitals (no, they don’t communicate). I, too, picked up a Bipolar Dx. along the way. With all of the seizures, etc. I was prescribed tons of anticonvulsants. during one of my infrequent lucid moments, I lined up all of the medications and checked out the side effects. The side effects were SEIZURES. The treatment of choice for C-Difficile, which is common with hospitalization since it is airborn and doesn’t respond to general hospital sanitization procedures, is to avoid meds in general, and go with a probiotic diet. I’ve done so, and dumped all the meds. Thank God I had the wherewithal to check out this stuff online. Of COURSE every condition is comorbid with something else. When you hurt, you feel like crap. When you feel like crap, you don’t want to do anything, and it’s labeled as depression. When you fall down, you get badly bruised. When you get bruised, you can’t sleep. When you can’t hold food or liquid, like touching a hot stove, your body learns to never feel hunger. Not eating causes malnutrition. That Malnutrition causes extreme weakness and seizures…and etc. Systems theory would call that a “convergence of events”. There is no one “cause”. To paraphrase a famous system theorist’s last words (two days before he died), “You’ve been handed a life full of anxiety. Do the best you can with it, and when you believe you’re right, go with it…” I think he meant that it would be in our interests to truly put the latest evolutionary development–the neocortex–to use rather than rely completely upon the “experts”. Do your own research with the meds. find out for yourself what works. Keep a log. Experiment. It’s YOUR body. Take my word for it…there’s NO questions at all when you meet someone that’s truly manic.

Another viewpoint which suggest that people develop pain as the result of psychotropic drug use

http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/fibrobipolar/