How Antidepressants Work

Understanding the complex chemical processes of antidepressants is a book-worthy endeavor. This article will focus on how some of the most commonly prescribed drugs work. These drugs are called serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors, otherwise known as SSRIs.

About Depression

To understand how SSRIs work, it is helpful to understand the chemistry behind depression. Serotonin is a chemical in the brain that helps to regulate everything from sleep and appetite to mood and behavior. When the amount of serotonin in the brain is knocked off balance, patients may experience symptoms of depression. It is this imbalance that SSRIs and other families of antidepressant drugs work to correct.

In short, the delicate balance of chemicals in the brain has faltered and needs assistance to stabilize itself. This is why people with medical depression cannot just “snap out of it.”
There is a stigma attached to depression and mental illness. But unlike the assumption asserted by this stigma, people with depression are suffering from an actual disease. Medical depression is not just a “funk,” but is a real problem that needs real treatment.

SSRIs

By affecting the uptake of serotonin, SSRIs help to rebalance the brain’s chemical processes and alleviate symptoms of depression. Correct treatment and relief is a matter of finding the proper dosage for each individual patient. Doing so can take some experimentation.

SSRIs are commonly prescribed because they tend to have fewer interactions with other types of drugs and can be used to treat depression in all its various forms, from common anxiety to severe depression. SSRIs are part of a relatively new class of antidepressant treatments and are considered ideal to use for long term therapy.

Because patients tend to tolerate SSRIs better than Tricyclic Antidepressants, these drugs are more commonly prescribed. Fluoxetine is a common SSRI found in popular prescribed drugs like Zoloft and Prozac.

Patients should not take SSRIs within two weeks of stopping Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (drugs like Parnate and Marplan, for example). SSRIs may take anywhere from four to eight weeks to produce results. However, some patients experience a robust reaction to the drug and begin to feel better in a relatively short period of time.