There are lots of people claiming that they don’t and for an assortment of reasons
Many of them try to explain why too, however it is all very confusing and if you’re suffering from depression and you have taken pills and have gotten no relief from symptoms plus loads of side effects, it can leave you feeling even worse than before you took them and that’s quite apart from having to face putting antidepressant use on health forms for the rest of your life and the stigma that can attract.
For certain people it seems that their belief that if they mention symptoms of depression the only answer their doctor will give is the drug option and this is causing many to not mention them at all even though they could be getting other types of treatment. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/09/13/140439308/fear-of-antidepressants-leads-people-to-shun-treatment?ft=1&f=1001
So the problem with antidepressants
Sometimes they don’t have a measurable effect and part of that is because we are measuring how we feel not what the drug is doing. If we tested to find whether taking a SSRI (serotonin reuptake inhibitor) actually raised the level of serotonin on the brain we may well find that it did increase but will that make us feel any better?
Not necessarily and that’s the problem.
Neurotransmitters (of which serotonin is one) have many effects not just single ones and therefore you may well increase one and find that another may counteract it keeping you in the same place emotionally even though it has changed the chemical balance. Antidepressants have to target very specific proteins to reduce systemic side effects because each transmitter affects several different things which can mean they have no measurable effect for you.
For instance serotonin also affects sleep patterns and appetite so if you increase it on the brain you may change both how much you sleep and how much you want to eat. Equally your emotions are affected by changes in other neurotransmitters which have been affected by hormones and so the problems escalates.
So why don’t antidepressants work well here’s an answer
Because the cause of depression has been oversimplified and drugs designed to treat it aim at the wrong target, according to new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
However close I feel this is the rest of the article goes on about a study done on rats and for the life of me I don’t see how they measured depression in rats however I have not read the original article.
Her findings are based on extensive studies with a model of severely depressed rats that mirror many behavioral and physiological abnormalities found in patients with major depression. The rats, after decades of development, are believed to be the most depressed in the world
I think believed is the answer here and it would only be true for those people whose symptoms were similar to the rats and not those whose symptoms were different. That this research has opened up an avenue of inquiry but I can find no peer reviewed research paper here just a report on a conference talk given 2 years ago and it’s not listed on pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ an index of published scientific articles), which suggest that actually this is not a strong line of enquiry.
The annoyance here is that so much information is being reported but there’s no backing for it and really whether antidepressants are off target or not isn’t an argument we need to worry about when we are trying to alleviate our own suffering the question is do they help?
If they do great, but if they don’t move on.
No doctor worth his salt is going to insist you keep taking something if it causes you horrible side effects and isn’t working. They may caution you about the alternatives but they will seek an alternative if you discuss the problems you’re having with them.
Equally I would consider the time period over which you are taking them if you are not receiving any other treatment (i.e. talking therapy, counselling or the like) and start asking yourself when you should review the use of them. Time heals a lot of the problems that may result in you needing antidepressants however if you are not healing/ still depressed after a year without them then you may need other help to recover.
Similarly if you are low and have been for a long time people may well suggest them first purely because they are easy to prescribe rather than arrange a talking therapy but if you would prefer that then speak up or go and find it yourself. There are lots of places you can get therapy however they may well cost however many places will give reduced rates to people who are on low incomes.
What it really comes down to is this;
Do you feel that taking them is a good option for you? Because it really is your choice and no doctor should bully you into it, however if they strongly suggesting that you take them, then please consider your options very carefully because they can give you relief from your symptoms and even with therapy you may need that to be able to heal yourself.
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