Why are so many against antidepressants?

[Mamaalwaysworried]

I've been suffering with PND and anxiety following DD2 for 16 months. For ages I was in denial, then I thought it will go away on its own. Once I finally talked to DH and a few friends, I got the sense that most people are very anti drugs for depression.

I might be ignorant but why is that? Do you become reliant? Can you ever come off them and be normal again? Can PND and anxiety just go away?

I go through periods of feeling fine and I think this must be it, I'm out of the other wise, then I hit and crash lower than before.

Anxiety increased! prays for edit button

The ‘threat’ of social services is totally false. You need to be at full strength to care for a child and sometimes AD can help.
They don’t work for everyone and if they don’t work for you then you can stop taking them. They’re an option which might make things easier at a difficult time.
I personally owe them my life but people react differently to them.
I strongly recommend talking to your gp and discovering all the support available, there’s a lot of people and services (and pills) that can make things better for you).
Good luck.

Side effects. I found they did negatively affect my sex drive, as well as causing other weird mood swings and general grumpyness. I didn't like me on them.

Masking the real issue. I found them slightly useful in the short term, but ultimately the only 'cure' for my low mood was dealing with the cause of it. Long term antidepressant use seems to me like just giving painkillers or a broken leg, instead of realigning the break and putting a cast on.

Being labelled with a mental health problem. This does happen. I spent years trying to get a medical problem investigated because doctors were putting every symptom I had down to "stress". Eventually my medical condition was picked up by accident while doing blood tests for something else.

However, I do think anti depressants can be very helpful, but as with all drugs it is about getting a balance between the good and bad effects.

Depression can be caused by a lack of serotonin.
SSRIs (ADs) assist with the imbalance.
They are helping with a physical illness which causes mental issues.
You would take pain killers if you had pain or blood pressure tablets if you had high blood pressure.
There's no difference really in a very simplified way!

I needed Ads after I had my second. I was worried about it and vividly remember my lovely GP saying " If you had walked in here with a thyroid issue i'd prescribe Thyroxin and that would have been it...nobody batts and eyelid...but because you present with a mental health issue...it's all worry, decisions and is the medication necessary?"

I took the medication...It was the right decision. I took 2 years worth then didn't need them any more. That was 9 years ago.

I'm not against anti depressants but I do believe they are are a temporary fix and not a cure as with all medications for mental health. I do think that sometimes they are necessary and a good thing though.

I think one of the reasons people are against antidepressants is the British stiff upper lip thing, and the fear/ ignorance around mental health.
To the people who fear SS , I had to chuckle. SS doesn't always have enough resources to care for kids whose parents are dysfunctional heroin addicts.
So think you'd be ok on prozac.
I would go for it op, it's like turning a light switch on, suddenly you have your life back.

Ss wouldn’t get involved with depression or anxiety unless you were showing worrying behaviour that you might harm yourself or your children. I went on anti depressants after the birth of my second son which came a year after the death of my first son so I was totally bogged down in it all. My mum in the end told me I had to come off them as she noticed I was completely spaced out and had a total don’t care attitude, nothing phased me sort of thing, very disconnected. They also gave me bad headaches. I know a lot of people who are on them, and the ones who have been for years say they hate it as they have worries over weaning themselves off them. It really is a what suits you situation. But I’d be tempted to ask the doctor to check iron levels and thyroid etc first. Just to check it all out.

I'm at the other end of the age spectrum to a lot of you. I got terrible anxiety during the menopause. It was affecting my work, so the doctor prescribed Citalopram. I have to say I was sceptical, but it's been brilliant. I've been on it for nine months now and I feel human again.

I think there is still a lot of stigma around mental illness, there are still people around who don't believe that depression is an illness and feel that people should be able to pull themselves together and that needing antidepressants is a weakness in some way. Antidepressants have saved my life in the past and the way I see it they are a medication to correct a chemical imbalance in the brain in the same way insulin is a medication to correct a chemical imbalance in the pancreas and I bet those people wouldn't be telling you to manage without insulin if you needed it. To me it is no different.

Antidepressants are not addictive, sometimes people take them for a while and then don't need them again or are able to go long periods without needing them (me) sometimes people need them long term (DH). There are lots of different ones and different ones suit different people. Some people get side effects with some but I've never had bad side effects and mainly only when I've first started them and they settle after a couple of weeks.

Your GP is very unlikely to get SS involved. They would only do that if there was a safeguarding issue. PND in itself is not cause for this. DH suffers with depression and psychosis and me with Depression, anxiety and PTSD, we have been assured by our mental health professionals that they work with lots of people with kids and it is very unlikely that SS would get involved.

SSIDs don’t address the low levels of serotonin which cause depression. They just keep whatever is there there for longer.

Practicing Mindfulness has been shown to increase seratonin levels.

SSIDs don’t address the low levels of serotonin which cause depression. They just keep whatever is there there for longer.

Thus increasing the concentration that is present at any given time. I'm really not sure how you can possibly nitpick about that.

I think lots of people have experience of them not really helping - there certainly seems to be a lot of low expectations re. results and thus very little interest in getting the dosage or the specific medication right amongst GPs.

Anti depressants and depression are too easily diagnosed in my opinion. I was diagnosed and signed off work with depression despite saying I didn’t feel depressed I felt ill. Allegedly I was in denial. Handed anti depressants and given therapy. About two years later I was diagnosed with MS which was basically what all my original symptoms were pointing to. It does make me feel really angry because no one wanted to listen and it’s far easier and quicker to chuck you some anti depressants and shout next patient

They work for some people, some of the time, and some people get side effects. I think there is a kind of ethos that you ‘should’ overcome mental health difficulties without resorting to a pill (some people see it as the easy option, short term solution), but you could flip that and say, well, if there is a chance they will make you feel a bit better while you work on changing things, then that is a helpful thing. Get some GP advice, and hopefully someone to talk to as well - for my friend when she had PND it was a lovely health visitor who helped her through it.

Yes Tara, another good point. Ms and other disorders, and vitamin deficiencies can all present with similar symptoms. It would make sense to get these things tested first before dishing out the ADs.

The link between serotonin and depression is not fully understood. It is a theory.

Anti depressants only tend to be effective in cases of moderate-severe depression. You get people (journalists etc) who get prescribed them for mild depression and then find all they feel is numb, or side effects. They then read some books or do some yoga and feel better, and then conclude that anti depressants don’t work and that everyone should do what they did instead, and get all evangelical about it.

They ignore that other people find that AD’s enable people to feel emotion, when they couldn’t before, or read a letter, when before the words danced around on the page, or sleep for more than 10 mins at a time, or have the motivation to do that yoga. Other people’s experience doesn’t tend to be their experience, so we don’t hear about it.

ADs do work. They dont work for every single patient or every single situation but overall, they have an effect. They are not addictive.

I think they have a place. For some patients they seem to work long term, and are almost an essential - these patients I think fit the classical (and increasingly under fire) ‘chemical imbalance’ model. No one actually knows how they work. The serotonin model isn’t very solid.

For some patients they are a useful short to mid term tool - they can provide Sufficient relief to allow the patient to continue functioning, and to access other help.

For yet other patients they don’t work at all or worse, trigger suicidal ideation.

What this seema to show is that ‘depression’ is not a disease in and of itself - it’s a bit like fever, you know it when you see it but it’s a symptom not a condition in itself. I personally think our understanding of depression is still at a very eary and very basic stage.

It can also be a rational response to a bad situation - grief for example. Or violence, or lots of things. 

So in summary: a tool in the armoury. To be tried as needed alongside other longer term talking therapiesx

For yet other patients they don’t work at all or worse, trigger suicidal ideation

I was suicidal on Antidepressants, for me I think it was a sign I was getting better. When I was really poorly I wanted to die but didn't have the motivation to do anything about it, when I started to feel better I had the motivation. The suicidal thought passed as I continued to get better and ultimately I believe the antidepressants saved my life.