Antidepressants can help

If you or someone you know experiences depression and antidepressants are recommended by your doctor, take them. They can help you to feel better which will make your recovery from depression a lot easier. 

It’s very unfortunate that so many people are against antidepressant medication. I recently came across an article called ’10 ways to treat depression without antidepressants’. Most of what was written in it was sound and useful advice but why the do-anything-but-take-antidepressants message? Wouldn’t it sound a bit ridiculous if the title of an article was ’10 ways to treat diabetes without insulin’ or ’10 ways to treat cancer without chemo’? To me it is ridiculous to talk about treating depression without medication, as if medication is to be avoided at all cost. Yes in mild cases of depression exercise and social support along with some lifestyle changes is a more effective treatment plan than antidepressants but when it comes to moderate or severe depression medication IS a good treatment that works.

To be clear, I don’t think medication alone is sufficient as a treatment for depression. Improving your sleep, eating healthily and getting active are important parts of recovery as are finding positive ways to unwind, relax and get enjoyment out of life again. For many people treatment also requires addressing negative thinking patterns, managing stress better, improving self-esteem and living a generally more healthy lifestyle. For some treatment provides an opportunity for personal growth and positive change in their lives. However, medication kick-starts recovery and can give you the energy and lift to start doing what you need to do to recover.

I’m talking from personal experience here. I’m still on antidepressants after becoming very unwell last year with severe depression and anxiety. I’m still doing cognitive behavioural therapy that has helped me to tackle long-felt inadequacies and insecurities. So I’m still in the process of recovering. Medication helped me immensely as did all the other things that formed part of my treatment. I know from talking to many people who’ve experienced depression that medication was a great help to them too and I know professionally that research evidence strongly supports the use of medication as part of a holistic approach to the treatment of moderate and severe depression.

Perhaps the anti-antidepressants sentiment that it seems a lot of people feel reflects two things. Firstly, if you’re depressed and the only treatment you are offered is antidepressants that is not enough and rarely feels like enough. The vulnerability and fear that comes with the experience of depression is crushing. Care and support are critical to recovery from family and friends and from professionals. That’s why medication when combined with a talking therapy is the most effective treatment psychiatrists can offer for depression. Even if you are just attending your GP and they don’t refer you for counselling or CBT, if they are a skilled compassionate listener, this combined with medication and some practical advice on mood management, may be more than enough for you to start recovering.

However, if you get 10 minutes with a GP, are handed a prescription for antidepressants and are told to come back in a month if you’re not feeling better, this is totally inadequate. Thankfully this is far from my experience but if it is yours please know that it doesn’t meet basic treatment standards and doesn’t give you what you need. But let’s be clear, this doesn’t mean that antidepressants don’t work. They can and do work but treatment without compassion and guidance is insufficient and heaps too much of a job on a pill which is designed to lift your mood not replace human support. And when we don’t open up and let others know we are struggling with depression it makes it even less likely that a pill alone is going to work.

Secondly, perhaps taking medication when you’re feeling very low is something that some people find too threatening. If your doctor recommends antidepressant medication it is because you are presenting with symptoms of moderate or severe depression. Being diagnosed with a mental illness is still very hard for many people and understandably so. While there can be relief in a doctor’s diagnosis when we have been suffering, none of us want to be sick physically or mentally. However in the case of mental illness there is the issue of stigma and the fear of what it means to be a person who is diagnosed with a mental illness.

I wish this stigma was a thing of the past but it’s not. I think it’s less than it was but it still hasn’t gone away. And as long as there is a stigma in our culture surrounding mental health problems and mental illness, some people will be unwilling to accept a diagnosis of depression and/or treatment. For me, taking antidepressant medication was part of accepting that my doctor was right when she diagnosed me with depression. I had to accept that I was really struggling and that I needed help to get my mood back up (I had already tried everything I could to try to feel better). I also had to accept that I needed to re-evaluate some aspects of my life and with support make some positive changes.

Life is complex. Humans are complex. Depression is complex. There is no simple one-size-fits-all treatment for depression just like there’s no one way to be in this world that works for everyone. But please give yourself a break if you ever feel you are struggling with ongoing low mood and go and talk to your GP. If they recommend antidepressants take them and after reading this you know to ask them what support options they recommend to assist you in your recovery (see below for some ideas).

In one word I would summarise my experience of depression as horrendous but I would summarise my experience of recovering from depression as wonderful. I hope if you ever experience depression that you get the right treatment and care, which of course you deserve, and that you experience a full and meaningful recovery. Antidepressants do work and can really help you on your recovery journey. Here are some of the other things I found particularly helpful in my recovery:

• Talking to my partner Claudio, friends and family about what I was going through especially on the bad days
• The skilled and compassionate help I got from my GP, psychiatrist and cognitive-behavioural therapist
• Taking antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication
• Taking sick leave from work
• Using the Headspace app to learn and practice daily mindfulness meditation
• Doing cognitive behavioural therapy to work on long-held fears, unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs that stood in the way of my wellbeing
• Having a few key people who I checked in with regularly and who checked in with me to see how I was doing and who knew how to handle me especially on the toughest days (thanks in particular to Claudio, Catherine, Eithne, Jennifer and Javier for being my key recovery people)
• Being told by my key recovery people, “this is you when you are depressed and when you recover you will think and feel differently”, “you will get better”, “this will pass” and “you are going to recover” which I often found hard to believe
• Reminding myself again and again and again that “this is depression” when I felt awful and was plagued by dark or frightening thoughts that could so easily engulf me
• Using the Mind Over Mood workbook
• Listening to the New Psychology of Depression talks by Prof Mark Williams and Danny Penman on YouTube
• Getting good sleep (yes, with the help of medication) which I badly needed after a prolonged period of insomnia and exhaustion
• Taking regular baths to relax
• Turning off my mobile phone for extended periods and keeping it on silent with vibrate off for minimal disturbance when I turned it on
• Using text, email and IM to communicate with people when talking was too difficult
• Baking simple things like scones and sponges
• Being open and telling people I was unwell with depression
• Going for short walks or short cycles
• Meeting friends even when it felt like too much to do (I never regretted spending time with them)
• Letting people do things to help me when they offered
• Making a simple weekly plan for the week ahead every Sunday and identifying one thing to do in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening
• Adopting the mantra wellbeing is a daily activity to remind myself that what I do today can change how I feel today. This was especially useful when I’d wake up feeling crap or didn’t feel like doing anything because I was feeling so low.

© Odhrán Allen 2015

You can follow me on Twitter at @odhranallen for tweets on everything from LGBT equality and mental health to street art and figure skating.