|
 Despite the name, antidepressants are often used in the treatment of other conditions, including anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, eating disorders and chronic pain.Depression hounded me through my teens and twenties. It was just the way it was. Not until I got married and my raging moods began to take their toll on someone else and threaten our relationship did I decide to seek help.
I had always been resistant to chemical solutions for depression. At the age of six months, a well-meaning doctor prescribed Valium to treat my “hyperactivity.” To this day,
I shudder to think what effects that had on my young, developing brain. In my teens, as I struggled with the usual pains of high schools – extreme shyness, the pressure of exams, bullying, etc, my doc prescribed tranquilizers (not telling me what they were). After two days of feeling worse than ever, I flushed them down the toilet.
Fast forward to a few months before my thirtieth birthday. Everything was grey. I would go through days with no recollection of what I had done. I was disconnected from everything. My husband would take me to a movie to cheer me up and I would break down in the parking lot, unable to cope with the decision of what to see.
Antidepressants can often cause side effects, and an inability to tolerate these is the most common cause of discontinuing an otherwise working medication.
The doc put me on Lexapro. I was so tired of feeling this bad that I gave in and tried drugs. I was reassured that Lexapro was a new kind of antidepressant with absolutely no side-effects. I felt better immediately. Despite being unable to sleep for the first week, I felt great. My mood swings improved at once. I was finally on an even keel. This is how life was supposed to be.
The American Psychiatric Association guidelines advise adding a different kind of pharmaceutical agent to the antidepressant. Studies suggest that most patients fail to achieve remission on a given antidepressant, and augmentation strategies used in clinical practice include the use of lithium and thyroid augmentation
So how did I get from there to where I am today?
As it happens there are quite a few things doctors don’t like to tell you about antidepressants. As time passes, chances are that you will need to use a higher dose and with a higher dose, often comes an increased likelihood of side-effects. Over the course of four year, my doctor changed three times. Each time one moved on and a new one took over, they would ask how I was doing and simply renew my prescription for another year. If I said I didn’t feel so good, my dose would be increased with little exploration into other possibilities.
Tags: Health Healthy Living Antidepressants Lexapro depressive disorder |
|
|
