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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
An important role in feeling better. However, eating healthy foods and working out is challenging when you don’t feel energized.Therefore, antidepressants have been a first treatment option for many Americans with MDD due to easy access and affordability.Antidepressants work by acting on neurotransmitters — but it’s not clear how that helps. Several classes of antidepressants are available based on the chemicals in the brain that they affect, such as serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. These chemicals are called neurotransmitters and are associated with mood. Some people may feel better by increasing one or more of these chemicals. It is common to try an antidepressant from one class and if that’s not helpful, either switch classes or add another class.For example, fluoxetine (Prozac) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) that boosts serotonin but does not boost dopamine and norepinephrine. This increases satisfaction, but not necessarily energy or drive. Increased satisfaction can help with both depressed mood and anxiety. This is one of the reasons SSRIs are typically prescribed first. Other classes of antidepressants include:Selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) such as venlafaxine (Effexor XR) and duloxetine (Cymbalta).Dopamine inhibitors such as bupropion (Wellbutrin XL, Wellbutrin SR, Aplenzin, Forfivo XL).Atypical antidepressants such as mirtazapine (Remeron).Do antidepressants really work? For whom?The question of whether antidepressants are effective has been debated for years. The best designed studies — where neither patients nor providers know who gets a drug or placebo and patients are randomly assigned to a drug or placebo —found antidepressants to have statistical advantage over placebo. But statistical significance is not the same as clinical significance. Statistical significance shows the findings are very unlikely to be due to chance. Clinical significance shows whether people’s lives were actually improved. Clinically speaking, some people find no improvement in their depression and experience bothersome side
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