What to expect when you start taking antidepressants. Tips from a therapist in Long Beach

This article was not written by a therapist.  It was written by someone who is not a therapist, just a regular person who deals with depression.  This article was written to help people who may have questions about someone else’s experience of depression and of medication.  In no way am I implying that this will be YOUR experience, but many people read blogs on various websites to get a “personal view” of depression, but blogs can have a lot of misinformation in them.  This article was not written by one of my own clients (as that would be unethical for me to publish). This is an article that describes many of my own clients, which is the reason I chose to post it.  I was given permission by the writer to add this to my blog.  So here it goes…

Begin an average person’s struggle with depression:

If you have seen ads for antidepressant, you have probably had to sit through a long list of potential side effects that could affect you along the way. That laundry list of ailments is enough to put some people off, but they really shouldn’t. I can only speak from my own personal experience, and what I can tell you is that one or two tend to rear their ugly head, while the others don’t materialize at all. That said, it may all depend on the medication you take, as well as the dosage. I was on the lowest level of (the medication) to help deal with my depression and anxiety.

The biggest issue that I faced in the early days was some insomnia and a restlessness that bordered on being twitchy. It will likely vary from drug to drug, but my experience was that it took 7 weeks for the medication to fully do its thing, and a further 7 weeks for it to flush out of the system after deciding to try a more natural approach. For me, things started to settle down a little after the first week, and I learned to nap during the day for an hour or so to make up for the lack of sleep I was getting at night.

I had already become accustomed to the insomnia, as I had spent several years lying awake at night worrying about things that might never come. The inability to sleep while on the Lexapro was almost calming, as my mind remained free from negative thought, allowing me to give more attention to problems that were in fact real. As I got in the habit of doing that, I found that I would start to drift back to sleep, taking my nightly haul from 4-5 hours per night up to as much as 7.

The ads on TV don’t really tell you much about how you are going to feel after you start taking the medication. After a couple of weeks, I still found that I would regularly have negative thoughts and bouts of anxiety, but they would very quickly pass. As the weeks wore on, I would feel those feelings and thoughts start to rise, but would also find myself quickly distracted by something else around me. It’s was an odd sensation, but one that I soon stopped noticing after a while. In short, the negative feelings stayed suppressed.

The one thing that did come as a surprise was that there were days, few and far between, where I felt just as bad as I did before I started taking the medication. Over time, I learned that there were certain triggers that would cause these lulls, which is something I will talk about in another piece. What I found out over time was that my life had become rather vanilla. The lows were, for the most part, gone, but so were the highs. I attempted to try and make it without the medication, and I will tell you all about that experience in another article.

BACK TO THE THERAPISTS WRITING:   As a therapist, I would recommend that if you are going to start medication at the recommendation of your doctor, to make sure you are also involved in therapy.  Therapy can help to make sure that you don’t lose those great times, the “highs” that this writer was talking about.  Also, I would say that if you do lose those “highs” to make sure to tell your doctor.  There could be a chance that you are on too much medication if this is happening and the doctor can work with you on adjusting it so if feels right for you.  Never alter your own medication without consulting with a doctor, but certainly bring it up with your doctor.  Often times, medication can take the edge off so that a therapist can address the deeper issues without sending you over the edge.  It’s kind of like the idea that you wouldn’t want to go into surgery without anesthesia.  In this example, therapy would be the surgery and “anesthesia” can be medication or even a holistic “medicine”/herb.  Nonetheless, I did want to share with you one person’s perspective on taking medication.  As a note, I would like for you to know that I do not push medication on people.  If you are dealing with depression, I will honor you taking or not taking medication. I will always encourage you to talk to your doctor so you know options, but ultimately I will respect your decision on medication.

I wanted to say THANK YOU to the brave man who wrote this article for my blog.  He is stronger than he may ever know and he has helped people simply by letting them know they are not alone.