A younger man goes to see a psychiatrist because lately he’s been feeling down. The two sit and talk for half an hour, and at the end of it, the psychiatrist recommends the man begin taking an antidepressant and sends him off with a prescription. Quick, easy, and painless. In modern psychiatry, this scenario is common place- between 2005 and 2008, antidepressants were the third most common prescription taken by Americans of all ages (citation). Our culture of instant gratification is much more inclined to pop some happy pills than to go through the grueling process of working through our problems – and who can blame us? But with less than one third of Americans taking antidepressants having seen a mental health professional in the past year (citation), it would seem that we have taken this quick fix too far.
The temptation to fix our problems with a pill may be great, but antidepressants are not the best option for most people – they are simply not effective enough to be worth the downsides. And yes, there are downsides galore, including side effects like “may increase suicidal thoughts or attempts” and “may increase or worsen depression or anxiety” (citation). As it turns out, happy pills aren’t as happy as they seem.
Take an example: when I was younger, my parents divorced. My mother shortly there after was prescribed antidepressants to help her get through the trauma. In the beginning, they seemed to be working well – she wasn’t happy, but at least she wasn’t depressed anymore. However, within a couple weeks she began to feel entirely emotionally drained, “like a zombie,” as she put it. She stopped talking to her friends, stopped wanting to do normal things like make dinner or garden, and slept more than 12 hours a day. “I didn’t feel sad,” she told me, “but I didn’t feel human either.”
Eventually, she went back to her psychiatrist, who she had stopped after being prescribed the antidepressants. He recommended that she was on the wrong antidepressant medication, and prescribed her a different pill despite her expressing that she didn’t want to be on medication anymore. The new drug came with the same problems as the last, and after months of medication, my mother had had enough.
She decided to stop taking the pills entirely, without consulting her therapist (“he didn’t listen to me the first time,” she reasoned). At this point, she started experiencing brain zaps -an unpleasant and common side effect of coming off antidepressants too quickly. Brain zaps are essentially a moment of disorientation accompanied by a visual flash – “like being woken up from a dream by a flashlight to the face,” my mother described it. Had my mother been more informed, she would have known that in order to get off of antidepressants she needed to wean herself off of them slowly to avoid some serious side effects.
Speaking of side effects, there’s a whole syndrome based off of SSRI (the most common type of antidepressant) withdraw, which includes such delights as vomiting, brain zaps, panic attacks/anxiety, insomnia, crying spells, increased depression, tremors, chills, fatigue, lethargy, headaches, dizziness, paresthesia (a sense of tingling or prickling with no apparent cause), and many more (citation). And this is not just for patients who attempt to quit antidepressants cold turkey – 20% of patients who go through a doctor-mediated plan for stopping SSRI’s experience withdrawal symptoms, according to Dr. Michael D. Banov, medical director of Northwest Behavioral Medicine and Research Center in Atlanta (citation).
Now, those are just the side effects for patients getting off of antidepressants. The list is equally long for patients currently taking them, including increased risk of suicide in younger patients, decreased sex drive (which can persist even after the patient stops taking the drugs), anxiety, weight gain, drowsiness, headache, nausea, constipation, and insomnia (citation).
And for all that trouble, many recent studies have shown that antidepressants are hardly more effective than a placebo, which raises the question of why they’re still one of the most widely overprescribed medications in America (citation). According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the FDA selectively published studies that portrayed antidepressants in a positive light and ignored those (with the exception of three) that showed that the drugs are ineffective (citation). So despite that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 10 Americans aged 12 and up takes antidepressant medication, serious doubt is being raised about whether they even do any good at all (citation).
There are even many psychiatrists who argue that antidepressants not only are ineffective at treating depression in a large portion of patients, but that they actually increase the chances that the patient will eventually relapse into severe depression (citation). According to a press release by McMaster University, the risk of a depressive relapse for patients taking antidepressants is 42%, compared to relapse rate of only 25% among those not receiving drugs (citation). In a different study of almost ten thousand depressed patients in Canada, it was found that over the course of 5 years medicated patients were depressed an average of 19 weeks per year, while non-medicated patients were only depressed for 11 weeks per year, leading researchers to come to the conclusion that “antidepressant treatment may lead to a deterioration in the long-term course of mood disorders” (citation).
This isn’t to say that antidepressants have no value at all – in some cases, they are the right option. Antidepressants should only be prescribed, however, to patients who demonstrate clear, chronic depression that is not linked to any recent trauma or trigger, like the death of a loved one or a divorce. Depressive moods linked to a recent trauma should be worked through, not patched over – medication can only act as a temporary fix, real traumas need to be tended to and fixed from the source, or else they will continue to be a source of trouble. Talking therapy can be extremely effective at treating both chronic and trigger-based depression, which is a great thing for anyone suffering depression as it’s completely risk and side-effect free. If time passes and therapy definitely isn’t helping, a drug may be considered to aid with regular visits to a mental health professional, but drugs in and of themselves are not the answer.
With more than 10% of Americans 12 and older currently taking antidepressant medication, and less than one third of those people having seen a mental health professional in the past year, the happy-pill craze has gotten out of hand (citation). Antidepressants carry heavy side-effects for medication that has been shown to be hardly more effective than a placebo, and are only temporary bandages to problems that more often than not need time and professional care to work through. The idea of a magical pill that makes depression disappear entirely sounds too good to be true because it is – the quick fix often leaves much to be desired.
I know I need to flesh out the response to counter-arguments part, and I might rearrange this all a little and add a couple statistics and quotes from psychiatrists/professionals, but what do you guys think?