How Serious Are Antidepressant Side Effects?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝I have been considering Antidepressants, but am concerned about the side effects including depression (how is that even possible) , suicidal thoughts, and anxiety, I don’t want to make things worse, should I be worred?❞

First of all: we hope things get better for you, whether with meds or not!

Secondly: we’ll quickly draw attention to our standard medical/legal disclaimer; we provide bite-size health science information here, and/but absolutely cannot give medical advice; for that see your own pharmacist or doctor (with the former generally being the better-informed about medication side effects), who will be aware of your personal circumstances.

Thirdly: we’ll now look at the actual topic with which you’ve kindly presented us 🙂

Most antidepressants work by increasing levels of one or more neurotransmitters in the brain, by one or more mechanisms. If that sounds vague, it’s because there’s a lot of antidepressants out there, and they fall into a lot of different categories of drugs.

For an overview, see: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key! ← which also covers why antidepressants seem to work a lot better for some people than for others

Consequently, because “antidepressants” is really an umbrella term for a lot of different drugs working in a lot of different ways, each of which may or may not help one specific person with their (or your!) specific kind of depression, there are numerous possible outcomes from taking antidepressants, including:

• nothing discernible happens
• nothing discernible happens, which is a crushing emotional blow as the person had been really counting on this working, so now they feel even more hopeless and wretched
• depression lifted, but an excess of one or more neurotransmitters in the brain (from having been boosted by the antidepressants) is now causing a different problem, such as anxiety
• depression slightly lifted, which means that a person who was previously feeling suicidal but unmotivated to do anything, is now capable of doing things, and thus more likely to act on the urge
• depression gone and no new problems (yay)

There are also other less obviously brain-related potential side effects, with weight gain being a common one for many antidepressants, but

• it’s usually not severe
• it can also be a matter of regaining healthy weight that one lost unhealthily while depressed

For more on that, see: How Much Weight Gain Do Antidepressants Cause?

Back to the potential outcomes of increased suicidality, depression, or anxiety:

With regard to suicidal ideation and thus potential suicidality, in this writer’s experience: key is understanding suicide prevention methods, and consciously choosing to employ them for oneself.

We wrote about that, here: How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)

Perhaps most importantly in this case: understand in advance that you might feel that way, and understand that it’s because depression lies to you, and that you have decided to defy that, live anyway, and come out the other side into depression-free life.

With regard to increased depression: chances are it was just the wrong antidepressant for you. If it’s not working out for you after a few weeks, you might want to consider rolling the dice again on a different class of antidepressant, or else trying a different (i.e. non-medicated) approach. See also: The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about depression-management strategies, whether in yourself or a loved one

With regard to increased anxiety: assuming that your meds indeed eased your depression, while giving you anxiety, then only you can decide for yourself whether that’s worth it. If you are open to the use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, then that has much higher success rates with anxiety than depression—because it’s a lot easier to flowchart one’s way through “maybe they didn’t reply to my text because they’re busy, and not because I’m a contemptible idiot and they hate me”, than it is flowchart one’s way out of feeling nothing and feeling like doing nothing. See also: Radical CBT Tools To Try

One tool with a good record against both depression and anxiety is Behavioral Activation, so check out: Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety

Last but not least….

Here are some traps to not fall into:

5 Self-Care Trends That Are Actually Ruining Your Mental Health

Take care!