Is there a substance that can instantly stop symptoms of depression?
This is a VERY hard question. Experts only, please.
I have a wife who suffers from depression. She has been on anti-depressants and they worked, but left her feeling neutral while on them, rather than happy and sad.
She is now off the medications (and has been for a couple years). Lately, she has been having depression strike in place of emotions like happiness or love. Instead of feeling the good stuff, she feels that feeling we get when we break up with someone.
My theory is that we could find a substance for her to take when she improperly dips into that pain (the breakup pain), and that alleviates it just like an aspirin alleviates a headache, then it might free her mind to feel happiness again.
Does anyone know of a substance that works fairly quickly that she doesn’t have to stay on, but can take more like an aspirin? Something that alleviates the symptoms, but isn’t an "anti-depressant" like Celexa or something?
Natural substances, illegal substances, medications
A little addition, in response to some of the first answers (and thank you VERY much for these first answers!):
Yes, ideally we would like something that isn’t addictive. That’s a bad problem. Also, won’t being on anti-depressants her whole life kill her? What about the liver damage?
Thanks.
Filed under: Alternative Medicine
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if your wife needs to take a psychotropic drug to deal with a mental illness, then she should immediately seek a psychiatric evaluation and go back on medication. this isn’t something to play around with. major depression disorder and other mental illnesses can lead to suicide if left untreated and unmonitored. you need a licensed therapist and a psychiatrist to do that properly, especially if you are concerned about liver functioning. the doctor can prescribe a safe dosage, order regular liver function and other blood tests, and monitor her progress.
there is nothing wrong with being depressed or having anti-depressents. mental illness isn’t a spiritual illness. it means the brain is sick. that’s all.
Trust me…..if there were such a pill, EVERYONE would know about it and it would be WORLD news. No one would talk of anything else for months. You’d know about it. It doesn’t exist. Nothing natural, prescription, illegal……nothing.
There are medicines like Klonopin which are a "quick fix." But these are prescribed for people who are also on regular medications, who occasionally have episods which their daily therapy can’t control. So they take these medicines when they need extra help. Think of an asmethic who takes pills daily to control their disease, but needs an inhaler when it acts up particularly badly.
Depression is a complicated disease. There is no pill that is a quick fix. Your wife needs to be on medication, daily, as well as perhaps needing counseling. Depression is a lifelong disorder. Sometimes it will be better than others, sometimes it will be much worse. There are things you can do that can make it better over time such as taking Saint John’s Wart, excercising so that she gets the benefits of endorphins, eating well, and getting enough sleep and trying to avoid stress. There are some magnetic therapies which are being investigated too, but are not approved yet.
Seriously, if you want the depression to get better, it is best to just accept that your wife is sick through no fault of her own and that she must seek treatment and take daily medication in order to control her depression. There are no quick fixes with this disease, and if you leave it untreated, it can get worse. Do her and yourself a favor and encourage her to go and talk to her doctor about getting this under control, the sooner the better.
Percocet or similiar is used and abused for just what you have described……………………
THERAPY
Not unless you want her to end up a drug addict. I can think of a couple of "recreational" drugs that might do that, but she’d get addicted super fast using them that way, and be totally non-functional, and definitely worse off than she is now. And there’s also the problem that they’re illegal so I couldn’t really recommend them here even if I did think it was a good idea to try (which it’s definitley not).
It’s normal for people to feel down sometimes. If they feel like that most of the time, it may be a sign of clinical depression. Depression is the result of a chemical inbalance in the brain. It’s a long-term thing, and it takes time to correct the levels of the relevent chemicals. Even if you could temporarily correct the balance on a short-term basis, it still wouldn’t produce the desired emotional effect because that’s simply not how emotions work.
If there were a substance that could safely and effectively relieve temporary feelings of depression on a short-term basis, it would already be in everyone’s medicine cabinet. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that works that way.
My suggestion is that she try antidepressants again. There are lots of different types on the market, and there may even be a couple new ones since she last tried them. If she can communicate with her doctor about what she did and didn’t like about the one she took before, and she’s willing to be patient, and try a few different things if necessary, she can probably find one that works. I’d suggest talking to a psychiatrist rather than a GP if at all possible as they’ll have much more knowlege about the different features of the various possible drugs, and are more qualified to mess around with doses and such until they find something that works for her.
Saint John’s Wort, but you have to take it regularly. I take 3 capsules twice a day (300 mg each), but that is reduced from 3 caps 3 times daily. I decreased it until the symptoms came back and then increased it to the minimum dose that gives me relief. The great thing is that I don’t get the side effects I used to get from antidepressants. I know that pain she is going through and it used to hit me like an attack. I would cry and feel bereft for no apparent reason. I hope that St John’s Wort can help her too. Be sure to use a reputable brand which uses standardized dose. It might take a few weeks to take effect.
Drugs mask symptoms. Handle the cause. Go to http://www.cchr.org to get the truth on psychiatry. Go to http://www.dianetics.org also.