Psychotherapy and Antidepressant Medications to Treat the Depression
28 10 2009Antidepressants, when mixed with psychotherapy, are helpful for taking care of very depressed people. Depression has been explained as a very bad mental sickness consisting of intense emotions like being sad and hopeless, enduring for weeks, maybe months, making it hard to concentrate, manifesting itself physically and having a bad influence on your lifestyle as well as relationships. It has been said that it is the West’s second most disabling disease.
Depression has many causes. It can start from extended substance abuse or after a certain situation like a loved one dying, or having suffered a heart attack or being stricken with a terminal illness. But maybe the most fascinating is the truth that depression is sometimes inherited in families. Depression is considered to occur due to imbalanced levels of the brain chemicals called neurotransmitters that govern moods.
Normally depression is treated in one of two ways. Psychotherapy is one of these, a method created to promote understanding of problems and help with troubled emotions, actions, or relationships. Being different from psychotherapy, biomedical therapy, typically in the version of antidepressants, has ended up being a well known remedy for depression. Among the current medicines, choices vary from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft, to others such as Wellbutrin and Effexor, for instance which focus on different or mixed neurotransmitters.
There are tons of jokes about these medications. As opposed to popular thought, the main function for these antidepressants are not to change a very depressed person into a person who is completely carefree and to make them more friendly, efficient, or give them better self-esteem, but they are instead to help them deal with the signs of depression so that the person can act like a normal person again.
Similar to many medicines taken as a remedy for sickness, antidepressants have negative affects like headaches, jitters, insomnia, decreased appetite, and sexual problems. In spite of these side effects, the general success of these antidepressants has led to their popularity. Prozac is taken by five million people in America, and twenty million worldwide. Research conducted with 159 outpatients, currently reported to the Journal of American Medical Association, show that people who used Zoloft for a long time avoided repeat chronic severe depression.
There is some concern about psychotherapy, which has been verified to work, being used less as a way of treating depression. A current examination of 600 very depressed patients verified that the ideal treatment procedure consists of a mixture of psychotherapy with medicine therapy.
If used as instructed, and along with psychotherapy, antidepressants are a helpful way to deal with depression. Despite the bad side effects, the positives are better than the negatives.
