New Zealand woman suffers severe reaction from depression medication: 'Burned me from inside out'

Charlotte Gilmour was having antiepileptic drug called lamotrigine. (Representative Image)

A woman from New Zealand issued a PSA after claiming to have suffered complications from medication she took for depression. Charlotte Gilmour claimed that she suffered a “terrifying” reaction and said that the medicines “burned me from inside out”.

According to local news outlet Stuff, Gilmour, 23, developed Steven-Johnson syndrome (SJS), a rare disorder that gave her painful blisters on her skin, mouth and esophagus.

SJS begins with flu-like symptoms followed by a rash that blisters and spreads. The condition is fatal in 10% of patients, New York Post quoted Mayo Clinic.

According to doctors, the woman developed the severe reaction, which only affects one in a million people worldwide, from lamotrigine. SJS is a known but rare side-effect of the antiepileptic drug, which is also used to alleviate symptoms of depression.

Gilmour said that she had been suffering from a chest infection for weeks and woke up one morning with a painful rash on her body. It is not known if SJS caused the chest infection.

“I looked in the mirror, and I just burst into tears. I think I subconsciously knew it was something quite serious,” she told Stuff. She rushed to the hospital where Filipino nurses recognised her condition but medical staff was quite unsure of it. It was scary, I guess, hearing … ‘OK, no one really knows a lot about this’,” she added.

“The scariest part about it is that it burned me from the inside out. So all the burns on the outside were because my insides were so burned that it started to manifest on the outside of my skin.”

She suffered blisters in her digestive tract as well and had to be fitted with a feeding tube. Doctors put her on steroids but they failed to help her. “So they stopped them … and then it just got worse and worse until there was one night it got so bad I pretty much lost my vision,” she recalled.

Gilmour was put back on steroids which “definitely helped in the end,” she said. She was discharged from the hospital after a month. Now, she has recovered but some of the symptoms still persist.

"I still get blisters pop up in my eyes and the rash flares up, always in the same place where the worst burn was," she said.