Does an antidepressant change your brain for life?

This has been an interesting question for years. The short answer is no. No one medication is going to alter your personality and make you a different person. The brain is far too resilient for that. It grows millions of new connections every day. It grows thousands of new nerves every day in the brain’s memory area, alone. It uses hundreds of chemicals to send signals. Antidepressants block the reabsorption of several of those chemicals. That’s not enough to create a tsunami wave of change. Although that would make a great movie!

Depression or bipolar mood swings can change your brain for life, however. Untreated, both these disorders have a high suicide rate, for starters. There are also high rates for failure in school and work and becoming homeless. So these armchair quarterbacks who pontificate about what medicine is or isn’t right for people–and they have no medical training, no practical experience in psychotherapy–I wonder how many people died because they listened to them. If they are really serious about understanding emotions and neuroscience, then by all means educate yourself so you know what you are talking about.

If you take an antidepressant and it doesn’t work, which happens about ⅓ of the time, unfortunately, then the medication hasn’t helped or hurt you. If it does work, what is happening is amazing. By blocking the reabsorption of serotonin, those nerves then see a boost in the release of nerve growth factor. This is the hormone that tells nerves to repair themselves, repair the outside of the neurons, grow new connections, and grow more chemicals to send signals. Like dopamine for attention, acetylcholine for memory, serotonin for mood, noradrenaline for mood and moIt iaivation. Doesn’t that sound ike a good thing?

I review this amazing story of brain chemistry in my book, Prescription For Positivity, with even more amazing brain science facts for you to ponder.

If an antidepressant works, then we see good things change. The memory center gets larger, after depression shrank it. The brains attention center, the nucleus accumbens, speeds up, so people can focus better. With better focus and motivation, people are likely to do more of the things to help their brain heal further. Such as exercise, socialize, get out in the sun, eat healthy.

I encourage people to ingrain these habits as part of their life that they would never do without. In some cases I have been able to slowly decrease the dose of an antidepressant, sometimes over a period of six months or several years, so a person eventually replaces the medication with a vigorous, healthy lifestyle. Without the medication, that kind of change would have been almost impossible for a depressed person to pull off. It is all they can do to get out of bed.

But this change is because of the person’s choices, in the end. Still, the medication played an enormous role.

If you suddenly stop an antidepressant, sometimes a person can get a withdrawal syndrome. Nasal congestion and waves of anxiety can happen. Some people say that means antidepressants are addictive. No, it just means you have to take a week or two to wean off it.

Sometimes then the depression will recur. Some people then say it means they got addicted to it. No, they have given people who are not depressed, daily doses of antidepressants and then stopped them and they didn’t suddenly get depressed because their brain was addicted to them. The depression might come back if a depressed person gets a good response to a medication and then phases off it–because the medication was working to correct a medical issue.

So antidepressants are a good thing. They just need to be used responsibly.