First of all let me start by saying that people who experience depression, should be able to know what kind of depression they are suffering from, meaning is it mild or chronic depression? Knowing this information can actually help you figure out what kind of treatment is best for you.
Two of the most effective techniques used to treat depression are the use of antidepressant drugs or psychotherapy. other techniques include are the electroconvulsive therapy, altered sleep patterns, and exercise.
Antidepressant drugs that are used include:
- Tricyclics operate by blocking the transporter proteins that reabsorb serotonin, dopamine, and nor epinephrine into the presynaptic neuron after their release.
- Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors(SSRI)- selectively inhibit the reuptake of serotonin.
- Serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors(SNRI)- block reuptake of both serotonin and norepinephrine.
- Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI)-block an enzyme that breaks down catecholamines and serotonin.
- Atypical antidepressants- miscellaneous group with diverse effects.
Antidepressant drugs are ineffective for many people. For people with mild to moderate depression, antidepressants are not significantly more effective than placebos.
Psychotherapy is about as effective as antidepressant drugs for patients with all levels of severity. Psychotherapy is more likely than anti psychotic drugs to produce long-lasting benefits that prevent or delay a relapse after the end of treatment.
Electroconvulsive therapy(ECT) is a treatmnt through an electrically induced seizure. Electroconvulsive therapy is quick and most patients awaken calmly without remembering it. ECT is used only with informed consent and its usually for people dealing with severe depression who have not responded to antidepressant drugs. its applied every other day for about 2 weeks and they give the patient muscle relaxants and anesthetics to minimize discomfort. the only side effect may be memory loss that can last up to several months not forever, if the limit to the right hemisphere is reduced.
After ECT has relieved depression a way to prevent a relapse is to use the drugs, psychotherapy, or periodic ECT treatments.
Lastly if you ge enough rest and excercise you save energy or release removing excess of stress that at times may be the cause of depression.
Altogether what i want to state is that after knowing how severe or mild your depression is you can find a way to fix that problem. Don't feel like you are stuck and there is no way out, because there is, you just have to find what best helps you out.
Great post Karla, I loved the explanations on the treatments, and what they do. I have to say though, when people are suffering from depression, I'm not sure if they can tell the difference, because of self denial. People with mild depression may feel, you know depressed because they failed an exam and then get back up again within a couple of hours or days, same goes with a break up, but to those people they may think its chronic if they are die hard school fanatics you know? Same goes with those with Chronic depression, they may feel nothing is wrong, when in truth everything was wrong. I know because I had a serious case of depression back in middle school and high school but to me I thought it was normal. Its the same with anything even anxiety, people won't know the differences if they don't know what illness or disorder are and what the symptoms include.
ReplyDeleteI think, if I ever developed depression, I'd opt for psychotherapy. Then again, I'm a little biased, being a psych major and all. It's just that I've heard enough horror stories about anti-depressants that I'd probably use that option as a last resort. I honestly didn't even know people still used ECT anymore. I thought it was outdated by this point, but I guess it's effective enough that it stuck around, huh? Anyway, great post. There are plenty of options out there for people with depression. It's really up to the person to put in the effort (which, understandably, can be difficult).
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. I think that the psychotherapy is the most effective therapy for us today. There are no side effects and no withdrawal symptoms. Our text book said something very interesting when it mentioned that if thoughts produce chemical activity then producing certain thoughts will produce certain chemical bursts in our brain. If that is true then what are we doing to our brain when we fill it with drugs such as antidepressants to produce the chemical activity that we should be producing by our way of thinking? Maybe all we need to do is train the people to think differently by different forms of therapy such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
ReplyDeleteI like how you talked about different therapuetic approaches. One great point you made was how psychotropic medications may help but so does psychotherapy, except that psychotherapy doesn't have the adverse side effects. ECT was a topic I almost blogged about this week, glad you mentioned it. There have been patients who had ECT regularly who suffer severe memory impairment. They also had to have a doctor declare them disabled to receive SSI benefits from the government because they cannot work. I enjoyed your post, great job!
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