Taking antidepressants: when and should you take it?
There is an ongoing debate about what depression is - just a depressed mood, a nervous system disorder due to a lack of vitamins or minerals, or a mental illness. In this regard, there is no consensus on how to treat depression, and whether it should be treated at all. However, for the person who is depressed, this condition is so painful that taking antidepressants is considered the most appropriate treatment. It would seem, what could be more natural than taking antidepressants in this case, and what to say about it? But it's not that simple.
Antidepressants have many side effects, and no doctor will prescribe them for long-term use, and in general, if it is possible to treat depressive disorders without drugs, they will try to do without them. Why? Antidepressants are not one group of drugs. These are substances of different groups that are used to correct the psycho-emotional state by interfering with the process of neuro-humoral regulation. Roughly and primitively, this can be represented as follows: with depression, the production of some substances is increased, and the production of others is reduced. Taking antidepressants can increase the content of a low one, and an increased one can reduce it.
Intervention in the subtlest chemical processes of humoral regulation of nervous processes is usually very rough, although the dosage is calculated accurately, there are individual conditions for each person, therefore, the dosage is usually selected already in the process of taking antidepressants, by trial and error. Therefore, very often antidepressants of a sedative effect, as a side effect, inhibit not only increased excitability, but also other neuropsychic processes, as a result, have a "numbing" effect. On the contrary, the use of stimulant antidepressants can lead to excessive disinhibition and sleep disturbances.
Be that as it may, taking antidepressants does not eliminate the cause of depression, which means that when they are canceled, everything will return to normal. Therefore, they can be used only temporarily, as "crutches", in parallel with other methods of treatment - various methods of psychotherapeutic influence, spa therapy or changing the lifestyle to a healthier one. By the way, the last two methods - influencing mental balance by influencing the body, often turns out to be very effective. The psyche is inseparable from the body, and often the healing of the body leads to a gradual alignment of the psycho-emotional background, and hence the elimination of depression.
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