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Thinking About Trying One of the New Antidepressant Medications?
“Want to look before you leap?”There’s a lot of confusion and misconception out there surrounding the new antidepressant medications that are used to treat stress-related injuries like anxiety and depression.If you’ve read anything at all on this site, you have probably picked up on the fact that I take a very strong stance on the use (and misuse) of these drugs. Right here and right now is where I’m going to tell you exactly why this is. I’m going to clear the air for you, and give you the low-down on exactly what you need to know about these drugs. Let’s start from the beginning … The history of the new antidepressant medications as we know them really began with the FDA approval of the first of the SSRIs, Prozac, in 1988. Prozac was followed by other SSRI’s: Zoloft, Lexapro, Celexa, Paxil, Cipralez, Lustral, Lovan, Cipramil, and all the rest (including related drugs like Effexor/Efexor). What’s an SSRI? It’s an acronym that stands for “Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor”, and it’s used to describe a certain class of drugs. Quite a mouthful. But what does it mean? Very simply, messages are passed between the different cells in your brain by certain chemicals called “neurotransmitters”. Serotonin is one of those neurotransmitters. Serotonin has been isolated by modern medical science as one of the neurotransmitters that deals with transferring information about your mood between the cells in your brain. Specifically, low-levels of serotonin are associated with people suffering from stress-related injuries like anxiety and depression. Think of serotonin a phone line, and the two brain cells as two people – for our purposes, two people named Bill & Donna. Say that Bill wants to communicate some information to Donna. So he picks up the phone and calls her. Donna answers the phone, and Bill says what he needs to say. Now this is important: when one brain cell uses a neurotransmitter chemical like serotonin to transmit information to another cell, the sending cell then takes the chemical back in a process called “reuptake”. It’s the equivalent in our example above of Bill hanging up the phone when he’s done telling Donna what he needs to tell her. What the new antidepressant medications called SSRI’s (“Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors”) do is they prevent the sending brain cell from taking back its neurotransmitter – the serotonin. The serotonin stays in the “gap” between the two cells, continually transmitting its information to the receiver cell. If you go back to our example with Bill & Donna, it’s kind of like Bill calling Donna over and over and over again just to give her the same message, like a broken record. What does all this mean to you? Pharmaceutical companies love to make the claim that their new antidepressant medications are helping to “regulate neurochemical imbalances in the brain”, imbalances which are the source of your anxiety or depression. But the only way to accurately “regulate neurochemical imbalances” would be to constantly monitor the levels of the MANY neurochemicals in your brain, and supplement them according to some defined standard of what “balanced” would be – an incredibly (if not impossibly) difficult process. SSRI’s don’t even begin to do this. Now you know what these new antidepressant medications are actually doing to your body. As opposed regulating the various neorochemicals in your brain, they create an artificial environment in which serotonin signals can be singly broadcast but repeatedly received. This discrepancy is the true source behind the manifold side-effects suffered by the people who are prescribed these drugs by often well-intentioned physicians … If you were Donna, and Bill kept on calling and calling and calling with the same message over and over again, would you keep picking up the phone? Of course not. You’re not stupid. You’re brain cells aren't stupid either. The result of using these new antidepressant medications to create an artificial environment like this is that the serotonin receptors in your cells downgrade their sensitivity. This results in three important side effects of the new antidepressant medications: * tolerance By “tolerance”, I mean that in general over time it takes a larger and larger amount of the medication in order to have the same effect. As serotonin receptors downgrade, they have to be hit with more signals in order to maintain your mental state. By “withdrawal”, I mean that your brain cells become accustomed to the artificial environment created by the drugs. As a result when you stop taking the drugs you are likely to have a range of physical and psychological symptoms ranging from nausea and vomiting, to sexual dysfunction (a common side effect when taking these drugs), to the infamous “brain zaps” which resemble the distinctly unpleasant sensation of a strong electrical shock directly between your ears. The withdrawal effects from these new antidepressant medications can last weeks to months, sometimes even longer. By “emotional blunting”, I am referring to perhaps the most disturbing SSRI side effect of all, the often-cited emotional numbness and apathy – a kind of overall “blah” mood, neither anxious nor depressed, but where you just can’t seem to get motivated to do anything. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again … only you and your doctor can decide if one of these new antidepressant medications are right for you. If you are feeling so depressed or having such anxiety that you feel you need to go see a doctor, please go. I am not a doctor and nothing on this website constitutes or intends to represent itself as medical advice. But if and when you do go to talk to that doctor, I want you to have your eyes open and have some idea of what you’re getting yourself into before you go down to your local pharmacy and fill that prescription. Whether you’re thinking about trying antidepressants, or if you’re already on one of these drugs and looking for ways to help wean yourself off the pills, I created HARDCORE Stress Management™ for you.
Is YOUR Child on Anti-Depressants?
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