by Stephen Lau
What Antidepressant Drugs Can Do
Depression medications are often the frontline treatments for major depression. This is especially the case with a severe depressive episode.
Why are depression medications necessary?
It is like you cut your finger. You need to use a Band-Aid to stop the bleeding. You don’t think of howor why you cut your finger; you just want to stop the bleeding first. That is exactly how people start using antidepressant drugs to treat their mental disorders.
What can depression medications do for your brain?
The human brain has two major functions:
- Monitoring and regulating body functions
- Ensuring survival by looking out for potential dangers
- Unfortunately, a depressive mind does not function normally: it fails in three aspects:
- Thinking clearly
- Solving problems
- Controlling emotions
When an individual is severely depressed, there is abnormal functioning in the brain due to:
- Faulty brain mechanism to regulate the productions of certain brain chemicals, such as serotonin
- Brain damage, often a result of recurrent and repeated depressive episodes
Depression medications, therefore, play a critical role in managing major depression in the following ways:
- They protect the brain from further damage due to repeated depressive episodes.
- Certain mood-stabilizing drugs, such as lithium, promote the production of a certain protein conducive to the growth and rejuvenation of nerve cells in certain areas of the brain.
All depression medications in some ways suppress serious symptoms of major depression.
In addition to improving the emotional well-being, depression medications may have other health benefits, such as:
- Controlling stress hormone cortisol to prevent damaging blood vessels
- Reducing cortisol to strengthen the immune system
- Lowering cortisol to reduce the risk of developing osteoporosis.
- Controlling the strong emotions that depend on the interactions of certain brain chemicals responsible for emotional response, clear and logical thinking, and a host of biological functions, such as sleep, appetite, energy level, and sex drive.
The imbalance of the chemicals responsible for your emotional well-being may be triggered by any one or all of the following:
- Deprivation or disruption of sleep
- A stressful life event
- Abnormal functioning of certain brain chemicals in neurotransmission
Depression medications do play a pivotal role in mental disorders.
What Antidepressant Drugs Cannot Do
All depression medications are designed to regulate your emotions and get your brain back on the right track so that it can respond appropriately to life events.
However, no depression medication can change how you look at the reality of life, or your personality. Above all, antidepressant drugs can change your life events — they still happen to you, with or without your medications.
The Side Effects of Antidepressant Drugs
Any depression medication, irrespective of the type, is a drug, and, as such, is a chemical that may have impact on your overall health and well-being.
Take Prozac as an example. Nearly everyone knows someone who is taking Prozac. It is one of the most widely prescribed and controversial prescription drugs for major depression.
Prozac, including Zoloft and Paxil, is a new generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), which “selectively” utilize the serotonin in your brain by blocking the degradation of serotonin, and hence improving any mental disorder due to the lack of serotonin.
Given that the serotonin system is the most widespread neurotransmission system in your brain, it affects many of your body functions, resulting in many adverse side effects.
Withdrawal from Depression Medications
Withdrawal from any depression medication is not only dangerous but also difficult.
Why is that? Because many psychiatrists have little experience in withdrawing their patients from antidepressant drugs, and most of them are unwilling to do so because of the risks involved.
If you insist on withdrawing from depression medications, you must seek the help and support of a psychotherapist and a general practitioner to supervise your withdrawal.
Tips on withdrawal from depression medications
- Stop one drug at a time.
- Withdraw slowly — it is better to err on the side of withdrawing too slowly than too quickly.
- Be aware of the development of any emotional or physical reaction within a few days after the withdrawal.
Any symptom opposite to the drug effect may be due to the withdrawal.
Rethink Depression Medications
Considering the pros and cons of medications may help you rethink depression medications, or at least have new perspectives with reference to taking antidepressant drugs.
To take or not to take
It is as dangerous to start taking any depression medications as it is to stop taking them. That is to say, withdrawal from any depression medication can develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical reactions. Therefore, any withdrawal needs medical supervision. Do not do it on your own.
Rethink any withdrawal — or think twice before taking any in the first place.
Mental depression is a biochemical disorder, and psychiatrists justify the prescription of medication based on this reason of being a “physical disease.” (See below.)
Rethink the justification of a prescription.
Information available to the public, including warnings and side effects, on any depression medication, is probably advocated by pharmaceutical companies, and hence does not reflect the true nature of the drug or its potential danger and toxicity.
Rethink the dark side of any drug.
A pharmaceutical drug is a toxic chemical; as such, it is potentially dangerous. Taking pharmaceutical drugs on a regular basis requires regular internal cleansing.
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Depression a physical disease?
Is depression a genetic and biochemical “physical disease”?
Many professionals and nearly all pharmaceutical companies would like you to believe it is “physical” as evidenced in weight loss, inability to focus, insomnia, and emotional agitation. You, too, may come to believe it is “physical” too because it is so real and so painful to you
Is depression a physical or mental disease, or both? Is it even a disease or simply a state of mind? Once you have identified depression as a “disease” you naturally turn to a doctor (which is only human and understandable), and subsequently to depression medications for help and treatment
Are they really your physical problems or the doctor’s problems? Do not give up easily on life in favor of medications.
Or is it mind over matters? Visit my web page: Mind Healing.
Rethink if depression is really your “physical” problems requiring medications.
The FDA approval
Dr. Peter R. Breggin, M.D., in his book Talking Back To Prozac, states:
“According to the FDA approval process, it doesn’t matter how many times a drug fails to prove useful in its clinical trials. Innumerable scientific studies can show the drug to be ineffective, but as long as two or more show statistical superiority over placebo, the drug can win approval.”
The bottom line: Any FDA approval is no guarantee of the efficacy or the safety of a drug.
Rethink any FDA approved drug.
The drug’s label
According to FDA regulations, any drug’s label must contain the following sections:
- description
- clinical pharmacology
- indications and usage
- contra-indications
- warnings and precautions
- adverse reactions
- drug abuse and dependence
- over dosage
- dosage and administration
- how supplied
The FDA works out the drug’s label with representatives of the drug company — often a give-and-take process. How much should you believe what the drug’s label says?
Rethink what the label says or doesn’t say.
Depression medication to jump-start your depressed life
Many people have the wrong concept of using depression medications to jump-start for a forward leap. It is tantamount to taking cocaine to stimulate an otherwise insipid life. Any stimulant drug that brings “high” will also inevitably bring “low.” In addition, there may be abusive potential and withdrawal problems.
To many, the positive side of depression medications is to raise your spirit and lift you mood, making you euphoric and feeling “better than ever.” However, it always comes with a price.
Rethink using depression medications to get an abnormal burst of energy.
Rethink the price you pay for being out of touch with reality and living in fantasy.
Medicines have not been perfect. But without medicines, things could be even worse. Medicines are not always bad any more than nutritional supplements are always good.
Take the example of Seroquel, a popular prescription drug for bipolar disorder. According to the pharmaceutical company, the drug has the following adverse side effects:
- High blood sugar or diabetes (excessive thirst or hunger, increased urination)
- Physical weakness
- Risk for cataracts
- Risk for seizures, especially with a family history
- Increasing the effects of alcohol
- Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) — high fever, rigid muscles, shaking, confusion, changes in pulse, blood pressure, muscle pain
- Tardive dyskinesia (TD) — uncontrollable movements of the face, tongue, or other parts of the body
You may find yourself in a catch-22 situation.
Is there another alternative, such as improving your conditions by other means while keeping a low dosage?
Rethink the trade-off of taking a prescription drug.
Biological psychiatry is itself depressing. It is not surprising that many patients go from one drug to another, searching for a cure and ending up in a psychiatric hospital.
Rethink your depression medications.
Only YOU have all the answers.
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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