If you are experiencing mild or moderate depression, chances are antidepressant medications won’t be any help to you, say researchers. These medications are only useful to those who are living with severe depression.
Millions of prescriptions for antidepressants are being written now that they’ve become so available and more accepted as treatment in today’s society. However, there have been many criticisms about how often the medications are being prescribed and for whom. It is often suggested that, although there are people who can truly benefit from antidepressant medications, there are those who would be able to manage by discussing their depression with their doctor or a counselor and making lifestyle changes.
Jay C. Fournier, M.A., of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and colleagues reviewed six large-scale studies, involving 718 patients altogether, that looked at the effectiveness of antidepressants in treating depression. The review findings were published yesterday in JAMA.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found that the effectiveness of the antidepressants depending strongly on how severe the patients’ depression was to begin with.
The authors found that the efficacy of ADM treatment for depression varied considerably, depending on symptom severity. “True drug effects (an advantage of ADM over placebo) were nonexistent to negligible among depressed patients with mild, moderate, and even severe baseline symptoms, whereas they were large for patients with very severe symptoms.
There is bound to be controversy over this finding because there always seems to be when studies like this come out. Some people would like to have an instant cure for depression, but that’s just not possible. Recovering from depression and managing to live with it takes a lot of work, whether it is through medication or other therapies.
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Post from: Blisstree