Antidepressants can cause relapse

[one_step_closer]

From the British Psychological Society http://www.bps.org.uk/news/antidepre...-cause-relapse

People who take antidepressants could be more likely to experience episodes of major depression in later life than those who usse no medication whatsoever. This is the suggestion of a new study published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology, which found such individuals could be nearly twice as prone to relapses.

Evolutionary Psychologist Paul Andrews, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University - an institution based by Lake Ontario in Hamilton, Canada - demonstrated that those who have taken, but then gone off, such tablets are at a 42 per cent risk of going through a bout of serious depression once again.

This compares to just a 25 per cent risk calculated for those who have never used antidepressants for their condition.

[Too Shy]

I can see a few possibilities as to why that might be the case - cause/effect needs to be considered obviously.

It's possible that coming off antidepressants may eventually mean that the individual ends up relapsing again later in life if the depression is down to levels of chemicals/hormones/neurotransmitters etc.

It's possible that the use of antidepressants for some people means that they attribute 'getting better' to the antidepressants alone, rather than their own coping skills. So for some people maybe they don't learn to develop different coping skills, so the next time they feel bad they don't feel like they have the right coping skills and so feel like they need medication again. Psychological therapy has longer-term benefits in that sense in that the individual learns to develop new coping mechanisms and/or to deal with the underlying issues as well as the symptoms (although even psychological therapies don't tend to have permanent effects long-term necessarily).

Or it's possible that those put on antidepressants have more 'severe' depression according to some criteria than others (I'm not saying that's my beliefs). I don't think it says in the summary, although I'd assume for a study they would have controlled for that in the sample. But it's a possibility, and if that's the case it would also make sense if those who later relapse were more 'severely' ill to begin with.

On the other hand, antidepressants can have very positive effects for a large number of people, whether that's to keep them 'stable' in the long-term, to keep them functioning short-term in a period of crisis, or to bring them up to a state of mind where it's helpful to try psychological help.