Lamotrigine ruined my life for years (+ CBT never worked well)

My previous psychiatrist (who strongly believed I did not have autism nor attention deficit disorder, years later it turns out I have both) put me on lamotrigine 100mg for 6+ years because of my mood swings, and it basically ruined my life. It made me extremely snappy and irritated at everything all the time (which was extremely exhausting), made my brain work significantly slower, and completely destroyed my word retention (I used to be proud of how good I was at talking, but with lamotrigine I genuinely sounded dumb and it felt humiliating). I mentioned all these issues multiple times to her, but she always insisted on not changing the med nor lowering the dosage.

I am not joking when I say that the constant irritability from the lamotrigine made me lose a lot of friends (because I was almost unbearable to be around), and went very close to ruining some of my most important long-time friendships. It also made me basically a recluse, because people irritated me so much all the time and I felt like i needed to defend myself even when people talked normally to me, with no ill intent whatsoever.

The same psychiatrist was also in contact with my previous therapist, which was a CBT therapist and was also strongly convinced I was not autistic because, and I quote, "I work with autistic (male) kids and you don't resemble that behavior at all". She also would genuinely get upset all the time because she would give me "homework" to do and I would promptly forget about them. She claimed that I was intentionally not putting effort into improving my life, and she was against me wanting to do tests for autism and adhd because she believed that I "just wanted an excuse to not put effort in doing things". After a few years, she decided that we were at an impasse because of my behavior and that there was no point in continuing our sessions, so she basically concluded our sessions out of the blue, without even giving me a referral to another therapist.

All my life (ever since when I was 7) I was always sent to CBT therapists, and I barely got any improvements, so after that last disastrous experience I finally, very hesitantly, decided to go for a psychodynamic therapist, based on a past recommendation (very, VERY hesitantly because I'm a psychology student and I absolutely loathe Freud and psychoanalysis, and found most of my colleagues interested in psychoanalysis absolutely insufferable, so I was worried that psychodynamic therapists would lean a lot into that). Best decision of my life, my new therapist is extremely supportive, helped me improve my life by a mile, helped me find public health structures that could do autism tests and adhd tests, and she also helped me find a new psychiatrist that's specialized in adhd (first thing he did was to remove the lamotrigine, he was baffled that my previous psychiatrist insisted on it). Plus I was happy to find out that psychodynamic therapy (or at the very least my therapist's approach on it) is very, very, VERY different from the psychoanalysis approach, even though they share the foundations.

I also found out I have "other learning disabilities" (cit.), per diagnosis from the learning disabilities center (which was another good recommendation from my current therapist), with specific notes in the diagnosis paper mentioning: partial dysgraphia (especially with transcribing audio into written text, no wonder I was so utterly terrible at taking lecture notes!) which affects both physical writing and "digital" writing (typing), partial dyscalculia (no surprise there), and most notably a very poor working memory (the one tasked with taking info from short-term memory to long-term memory). From what I got told, the mixed results in learning disabilities is relatively common for people on the autism spectrum, and the poor working memory is quite common in ADD/ADHD people.

Finally being able to know the source of a lot of my struggles was crucial in lessening the constant guilt I felt for failing at basic stuff (the "from gifted kid to utter failure pipeline" guilt used to be so overpowering that it was sapping at my mental energy every single day, every single minute, barely leaving me with any energy left), and it gave me the knowledge and resources to find ways to work around my problems instead of forcibly trying to "fix" them. It helped immensely in allowing me to improve both myself and my own life (so basically the exact opposite result of what my previous therapist was """fearing""").

Fast-forward to today, I am finally on adhd meds (Equasym seems to be less effective than Medikinet but with vastly less nasty side effects, so for now we're gradually increasing that) which help me being more productive, my mood has improved massively now that I'm not on lamotrigine anymore (finally I'm not irritable all the time anymore), I have an autism diagnosis and somewhat of an ADD diagnosis (my psychiatrist says that my ADD is most likely not genetic but caused by the combination of autism + depression since when I was a child, but that the treatment and symptoms are the same so he said it doesn't really change much from the "regular" genetic ADD), I am at a much better point in my life and I finally have the mental energy and focus to tackle addressing and fixing most of my other issues (for the most part physical health-related, some much-needed checkups and physical therapy that I have postponed for years and years and years that have taken quite a toll on my body).

I also finally changed gynaecologist (per advice from my therapist and my psychiatrist) and have an hysteroscopy + very hyperspecific blood tests scheduled to finally understand why my period never worked as it was supposed to (every 15 days instead of every 28, since my very first period at age 13 - I'm now 30+ -, only regulated by being constantly on hormonal contraceptives, which in turn were giving me all sorts of nasty side effects) and to find if there's any way to not make me absolutely lose my mind every pms+period since it not only worsens my ADD significantly (and makes the adhd meds completely ineffective during that time) but also gives me mood swings strong enough to make me feel like I'm going insane. All my previous gynaecologists just shrugged, labeled my side effects "common" and me as being "over-dramatic", and just kept prescribing me different/stronger pills once the previous ones eventually all stopped working due to excessively prolonged use.

I'm also now able to properly keep a daily log physical planner (leveraging my special interest in stationery) with the right balance of structure and flexibility (enough structure to make my autism happy, but not so much that it would be unmanageable for my ADD). I was also able to find workarounds and compromises that make it still bearable and worth it and rewarding despite my partial dysgraphia getting in the way.

tl;dr: removing the lamotrigine and changing from a CBT therapist to a psychodynamic therapist was life-changing to me and I wish I'd done it sooner. I know that a good number of autistic (and audhd) people swear by lamotrigine and CBT is the most well known (and most advertised) branch of therapy, so I felt like it could be useful for others to know that both things can have a very, very different outcome for some individuals.