Depression – Treatment Resistant Depression

Transcript

Treatment-resistant depression is basically a depression that does not seem to be getting better. There is no official consensus on what constitutes treatment-resistant depression and why does this person have it and this one does not, but a general rule of thumb that a lot of professionals will use is if they’ve tried two different antidepressant trials – so if they’ve taken one medication, adequate dose, adequate time, and it didn’t help them, they tried another medication at an adequate dose and an adequate time and neither of them seemed to help the symptoms – many professionals will then consider them to be treatment-resistant. It’s significant when we label someone as treatment-resistance rather than regular depression because some of the medication and treatment options that we consider may be different between the two categories. Additionally, if someone is having depression that just doesn’t seem to be getting better based on the conventional treatments, it should prompt the professional to continue to explore and consider other potential diagnoses that may be masquerading as depression and that’s the reason why it’s not getting better with depression treatments.