Constantly unhappy baby

[ALS17081982]

My baby is 7.5 months old and seems to be always unhappy. He doesn't cry but he is shouting and highly agitated perhaps 80% of the time he is awake. He hardly ever spontaneously smiles at anyone, I have to work very hard for a smile or laugh! When I meet my baby group mums it's painfully obviously to be that he is different. He's just so unsettled, he would never sit on my knee happily, I'm always having to take him to the window to calm him down. He's never woken up from a sleep happy to see me!

His only diagnosed problem has been a milk allergy. He was EBF until 6 months but now formula fed (specialist Nutramigen formula) and I have completely cut milk out of my diet.

Has anyone got any suggestions as to what could be agitating him so much? And what can I do?

I feel so sad that he seems unhappy

You poor thing. I can totally sympathise. I still have a vivid memory of taking DS1 to the baby clinic to be weighed, when the health visitor told me that he looked like a very unhappy baby (after she'd cooed over all the others in the room). I went home and cried.
Anyway, he was pretty cranky and always agitated. Turned out that he had reflux (he was never sick with it though). After a couple of goes at Gaviscon he was like a different baby.
He was younger than yours is now so probably not the same thing, but thought I'd share my experience anyway.
He is now a super happy 4.5 year old but I remember thinking that he'd never smile at one point!

I had exactly the same baby until I did some reading around nutramigen and CMPA. It seems nutramigen is milk proteins broken down but not eliminated and so sometimes children can still react to this, you may need an amino based formula like neocate in order to settle him. Not sure if this will help but worth a go maybe x

CMPI & soya intolerant 16m old here and can empathize with everything you've said it is hard going and you do long for that nice easy smily baby sometimes! Agree with pp my Lb can't tolerate nutrimigen, neocate isn't accepted well by older babies so I would go back to GP or peads and discuss again given he's obviously unhappy. On the flip side it does take a few months for their immune system to recover so depends how long you have been milk free for too xx