Nighttime panic attacks and Latuda

[Cassandra007]

Coming here 5 years after the fact. 
 

I started Latuda for bipolar depression that wasn’t responding to the lamotrogine I was taking. About 4 months later a stressful new job coincided with a unique form of nighttime anxiety unlike the GAD I’d struggled with my whole life. I struggled with it for 18 months, diazepam and lunesta being the only things to help. Which resulted in daytime fogginess and forgetfulness. 
 

Neither my p-doc nor therapist linked the anxiety to Latuda given the 4-month delay in the anxiety’s onset after starting it. I only cracked the code by discovering a few buried comments on this forum that described the specific experience of the nighttime anxiety—I called it the witching hour because it was like clockwork, and I had a whole routine to deal with it, which included isolating myself from my family and distracting myself by reading dry technical books until I fell asleep. 
 

As soon as I discovered comments here that described my experience among others taking latuda, I stopped taking it. The nighttime anxiety evaporated almost immediately. 
 

I feel like a jerk for not chiming in on this board at the time to potentially help others in the same boat. So…if you visited this sub-board trying to crack the code within a similar context, talk to your doc about switching to a different bp or schizophrenia drug. There are plenty of folks who thrive on Latuda, and god bless ‘em. But if you feel crippled by a new nasty panic, look into whether it’s your Latuda.