Does taking an antidepressant make you a zombie?

No. Modern antidepressants are good at just lifting your mood back to normal. Then you should have good sleep, energy, appetite, motivation, concentration, and you should have a sense of pleasure when you do things you normally enjoy doing.

And yet there are potential side effects. Back before the year 2000, there were anti-depressants that made people very tired. They were taken at night and sometimes people were still tired in the morning. If this was an extreme side effect, they may have felt like a “zombie.“ These are medication’s like imipramine and amitriptyline and clomipramine. But many times these medication worked very well and there was no daytime tiredness.

So as usual, medication get a black guy from people who like to talk bad things about medication.

Anti-depressants save lives all the time. And in fact, if you think about it, when someone gets depressed, they don’t feel like themselves. Their sleep is often off. They have trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep. They wake up tired and stay that way, most of the day. They have trouble focusing. Because of that their memory isn’t what it should be. They may have blunted emotions and this may come across with flat or muted facial expressions. They may avoid eye contact with friends and family. They are not acting themselves. so a good case can be made that depression kind of makes people into somewhat zombies. They clearly are not themselves and they know it and they don’t like it.

Modern antidepressants usually have no side effects whatsoever. About 10% blunt peoples emotions. That doesn’t mean there are a zombie walking aroundlike they’re on narcotics. It means in the past when they would giggle at a joke now they just smile. Or when they see a beautiful site, such as rainbow, there’s no emotional response. Maybe they lack of responsive Smile when someone else smiles at them. They’re not a zombie. Still this is an unacceptable though subtle side effect. It often can be avoided by simply changing to another medication.

When Prozac came out in about 1990, it was the first of a new generation of antidepressants that don’t, make people tired during the day and generally don’t blunt peoples emotions. It swept through our society as a revelation. You can be freed from this demon of depression by medicine that doesn’t usually have any side effects. Then you can learn how to think, and act in a new way, based on, generally having a good mood all day. This helped counseling work better. Prozac saved and continues to save thousands of lives.

So antidepressants don’t make people into zombies. The new antidepressants that generally don’t have any side effects, include vilazodone, which can start working within one week and has no sexual side effects or weight gain. Ones like this include Fatima. Other good anti-depressants include Effexor, Lexapro, Paxil, Zoloft, Pristiq, duloxetine among others. As you can see, there are many many medication‘s to choose from. This can be confusing, and that’s why you should be working with an experienced specialist, in other words, a psychiatrist when you are considering using a psychiatric medication. You wouldn’t go to your family doctor if you had a brain tumor now would you?