Anti-Depressants:
Why They Aren't the Miracle Worker People Believe They Are
Just like a person who doesn't exercise their physical muscles often
enough, people who don't deal with their emotions in a healthy way grow
weak from the inside out, and the solution of antidepressants is one used by
more people than need it. In the article "You're Not Moody, You're
Normal!" the MD Julie Holland speaks of reducing emotion medications,
"I do believe that too many [people] are being told to medicate away their
essential, authentic selves." The basic depression medication, a Selective
Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor or SSRI for short, is allowing people to pay away
their emotions without getting the positive effects from emotions either. In my
paper I discuss the basic reasons for not using antidepressants, why
people use them so often, why our emotions are vital to our well-being, the
benefits and losses from using antidepressants, and the types of people who
should not use antidepressants.
To kick things off, I am going to
clarify that I am not saying that antidepressants don’t work. They do, extremely
well in some cases. As I mentioned in the introduction, SSRIs are the common
antidepressant. In a simple explanation, doctors believe SSRIs block the
neurotransmitter serotonin that is blamed for creating sadness. Blocking this
transmitter boosts the brain’s activity and boosts mood (Mayo Clinic). As a
person who has experienced chronic depression, I can understand the main reason
people use antidepressants. They are used to quell the negative emotions you
feel when you are feeling depressed, such as lack of motivation, extreme
sadness, and depending on the person, panic. Inside your body, blocking off
serotonin allows your body to stay calm and react to things with less emotions.
This displays itself as numbing pain, and allows you to think clearly. Many
people are prescribed with antidepressants as an in-between step until the
person can find a solution. Others stay on antidepressants for years. Antidepressants
have kept many people from suicide. It is a positive for the pharmaceutical
industry, and people who are fighting depression. Antidepressants do work, they
take away the sadness and improve your mood.
However, there are some very big
benefits from not taking antidepressants. The cost of antidepressants can range
anywhere from, on average, $21 to a high of $1000 per month (Consumer Reports).
There is also the matter of side effects. Ranging anywhere from dry mouth to
death, starting and continuing to take antidepressants is like Russian
roulette. You never know if or when any of the symptoms will show up. From the
information I found on Consumer Reports, the inference can be drawn that few
people are only paying $21 a month, since the rest of the article talks about
how to save money on your antidepressants, which when combined with the side
effects makes taking antidepressants a risky choice that should be thought on
for a long time before being made.
People still risk their financial
funds and their health for these drugs if they work.
Unfortunately, people do not know exactly
how high the cost for taking these
drugs is, to their physical and mental health. In an interview with Beth Levine
in Oprah Magazine, the MD Julie Holland states, "Many people don't
recognize that their feelings can be an important feedback system... Depression
may mean something in your life needs to change"(72). When your body tells you that you are
hungry, you eat. When we are depressed, we should start searching for solutions
to our depression, and keep trying until one works. Otherwise depression will
keep coming back, in ways such as sadness from not getting enough exercise,
loneliness from the loss of a person close to you, or any negative emotion from
something that does not improve how you feel physically or mentally.
Antidepressants lower the amount of depression we feel, but it doesn’t solve the
unhealthy parts of our lives, and emotions are the key to figuring out where
this problem started.
In
a guide for knowing whether or not you should be taking antidepressants,
researchers address a few of the more common reasons for people taking
antidepressants. “It is normal to feel ‘down’ or ‘blue’ in the wake of a
stressful life event, such as the death of someone close, a divorce, or a job
loss. If you are still able to function and have no history of depression, your
symptoms will usually ease on their own within a few months… without the use of
an antidepressant” (Consumer Reports). Some people are using their money for a
drug they don’t necessarily need. Life hurts sometimes, but sometimes you need
to grieve and feel sad in order to move on from these events. Many people who
are depressed also shouldn’t take antidepressants for longer than a few months,
since the antidepressants are meant to calm down the depression enough for you
to deal with it, not to be a permanent solution. Julie Holland said “If you’re
only taking meds without also seeing a therapist, you’re not learning any new
skills, so when you stop taking the drugs, you’re not really any better off.”
To answer the counterargument that you could just stay on antidepressants, she
answered earlier in her interview that “… Nearly all antianxiety meds [such as
antidepressants] are sedating… Not only may you be more likely to experience
apathy, you may also feel less empathy (Oprah). If your goal is to get better
and live without depression, antidepressants should not be a long term
solution.
In
conclusion, I would like to end things with an interesting statistic. In her
article on the Huffington Post website, the author Lindsay Holmes
showed, "30% [of] college students reported feeling depressed, which
disrupted their ability to function in school." How many of these
college students actually needed depression medications? After much personal
research I have come to the conclusion that antidepressants, while good in some
cases, should not be used nearly as much as they are today. As I wrote
about in my paper, emotions warn us of bad things
in our life, and the need to get rid of them to enjoy life more. These warnings
allow us to grow and move past our problems such as the death of a loved one or
even depression itself. From these two statements we can conclude that emotions
are necessary to move past bad things in our life. Keeping this in mind, we
also need to understand that since antidepressants sedate their patients and
numb people to their emotions, antidepressants lower your ability to move past
the bad things in our life. If you choose not to move past the bad things in
your life the problems reproduce, causing you to buy even more depression
medication without getting the desired effect. That alone makes antidepressants
an unhelpful solution for many people in today’s world.
Works Cited
(This has no author)
"Best Antidepressant Treatments." Consumer
Reports. Consumer Reports, Sept. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2015
Levine, Beth. "You're Not Moody, You're Normal!"Oprah
Magazine April 2015: 71-75. Print.
Mayo Clinic Staff. "Selective Serotonin Reuptake
Inhibitors (SSRIs)." Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic, (n.d.). Web. 30 Nov.
2015
Holmes,
Lindsay. "11 Statistics That Will Change The Way You Think About
Depression" The Huffington Post. Huffington Post, 20 Jan.
2015. Web. 19 Nov. 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment