Anti-depressants - the good, the bad and the ugly

Anti-depressants divide the opinions - for some they area miracle drug, for others the work of the devil. I thought I might add my personal take on them.

The good: the right anti-depressant taken for the right reasons is simply fabulous. You go from a terrible state spending your days crying to normal life in 3 weeks or less.

The bad: if you're not very lucky, the wonderful effect of making your brain functional again comes with annoying to bad side-effects - from nausea and diarrhoea to migraines, headaches and/or a complete disappearance of your libido. Those side-effects may be temporary, the time your body adapts to the anti-depressant, or permanent for the whole time you're taking them.

The ugly: if you're very unlucky, your anti-depressant will have the opposite effect. It will take you from a bad place to a worse place, increase the despair, push you to suicide.

So why take them at all? Especially when the onset of depression has an identified trigger like grief?

In my experience, depression  can be so debilitating that no psychotherapy is possible, simply because you are stuck in such a fog of awfulness, that you cannot think rationally.

Then, if you are lucky and get the right chemical for you (no anti-depressant works for everyone unfortunately) you can regain enough brain power to start processing whatever it is you want/need to change in your life.

Please reach out and talk to your friends, your GP and/or therapist if you think you may be experiencing depression.


Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, nor in any way affiliated to the pharmaceutical industry, I am only describing what I learnt from my personal and professional experience...

What if the grief that we are "stuck" in triggered depression?

Seeing friends and family members with depression, listening to my clients with depression, and having suffered myself from depression, I started wondering if the common denominator, the trigger, could be grief that for whatever reason we cannot find our way out of.

I guess I need to define what I mean by grief and by depression. Depression is not just a "feeling low" but a disease that can be measured in terms of serotonin levels and other physiological cues, i.e. it is not "just in your head".

And when I talk about grief, it comes in so many different forms. Of course, the obvious one is the grief of losing someone, to death, disease or divorce. But that is only one version. Then there can be the grief of being childless, the grief of realising that you'll never achieve your dream job, the grief of not being able to save our planet - basically that feeling of loss and powerlessness that in turn can make us doubt our own value.

I watched this video of this very articulate woman telling her story of giving birth to her much-desired child and of finding out that her daughter has Down syndrome (please watch it, it is one of the most heart-opening videos I have seen - she's a stand-up comedian, so she's not your average woman). And this is when I realised how we can get stuck in that grief. When we keep holding on to the dreams we had, the potential we saw, the plans we made, all of which are now obsolete. 

And as long as we hold on to those dreams that can't be realised, to those hopes that have no way to be fulfilled, as long as we hang on to the potential of "what could have been" in that parallel universe where the outcome would have been different, we don't accept what has happened to us.
If we can't let go, we become stuck.

If we don't find a way back into this world, where the loss has occurred, then that grief stays with us and takes away our joy in life. And eventually all things become grey. 

So how can we find a way back into this world, the one where not only our grief and loss is happening, but also the rest of our life? 

Only if we reconcile ourselves to the new reality, the one with the emptiness, can we start to move forward again. Only if we spend less time wondering what "could have been", what "should have been", what "would have been", hanging on to the dreams we had, can we make space for new dreams.

Holding on, one day at a time.