I&#x27;ve never done illegal drugs, but for years suffered with depression and occasional had &quot;amazingly productive&quot; periods.<p>After one particularly bad bout of depression, I decided to see a doctor.  One of her questions was something to the effect, &quot;Has anyone ever accused you of having been on drugs when you weren&#x27;t?&quot;<p>The funny thing is, during one of my previous &quot;amazingly productive&quot; periods, I had a coworker who -point blank- told me she was convinced that I was on drugs.  I just felt high on life and told her as much.<p>The doctor ultimately diagnosed me as bi-polar, and we found a drug that would reduce the depression and not trigger hypermania or manic episodes (apparently a common problem with drugs that treat regular depression is that they can exacerbate bi-polar).<p>Fast forward a few years and I had to have knee surgery.  Thankfully, my mother was taking care of me and knew I had been diagnosed bi-polar, but I&#x27;d never had a full blown manic, so she didn&#x27;t know what that looked like.  It took three days for her to realize what was wrong, but almost immediately after the surgery I had slipped into a full-blown manic.  In the end, it turned out the pain medication and the bi-polar medication combined were triggering the manic episode.<p>I&#x27;ve since had to have several other surgeries and have learned that strong pain killers have a tendency to trigger manic episodes in me.  In a way I&#x27;m lucky, because I&#x27;ve never gotten addicted to any pain killer, and I&#x27;m coherent enough to let my providers know whether I need manic-inducing pain killers (i.e. I rather be manic than in that much pain), whether I can take less effective pain killers that don&#x27;t trigger manic episodes, and when I can just suck up the pain.<p>So, yes, drugs can trigger episodes, but it isn&#x27;t necessarily illegal or &#x27;bad&#x27; drugs that do so.