Depression – Medication Effectiveness

Transcript

People who take these medicines will start by taking them usually daily – your doctor will tell you if you should take it at night or in the morning. They’ll take it for a while, so patients will often take it for a few days and say it’s not doing anything. It’s not helping at all. To which the doctor will usually encourage them: keep taking it, stick with it every day, and usually what will happen is that after a number of weeks of taking the medication (and that can vary from person to person), they’ll come back to the doctor and say: You know, hey, come to think of it – I do feel a little bit more myself. I don’t know when it happened. There was no light switch that went on, a sudden moment of feeling better. But kind of just gradually in the background, something has been kicking in and I feel a little bit more back to myself. I’m sleeping a little bit better. I’m eating a little bit better. I’m not as numb as I used to be. We usually recommend taking the medication between four and six weeks to gauge an appropriate response to the medicine. Some people may show a response earlier than that. Other people may take longer than that to show a response, but it is important to give it a significant amount of time to kick in before dismissing it as being ineffective.