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Antidepressants, used in conjunction with psychotherapy, can help treat cases of severe depression. Depression is a serious mental illness in which a person has feelings of profound sadness and despair for weeks or months, causing physical manifestations and severely disrupting life, activities and relationships. This has been termed the number two disabling disease of Western civilization.

There are numerous reasons for being depressed. It can begin from abusing substances for a long time or it can happen after a certain occasion like losing a loved one, having a heart attack or acquiring a deadly illness. Yet, interestingly enough, depression seems to have a genetic factor and frequently appears among family members. Depression is believed to result from imbalanced levels of the brain chemicals called neurotransmitters that control our moods.

A couple of primary treatment methods exist for the illness of depression. Psychotherapy is one of those treatments and it is designed to help people understand their problems and modify troubling feelings, behaviors or relationships. Biomedical therapy, usually taking the form of antidepressants, has surpassed psychotherapy as the popular treatment for depression. Included with the newest medications, choices range from certain serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, and others, Wellbutrin, and Effexor which have a different function as neurotransmitters.

This type of pharmaceutical is often the butt of a lot of jokes in our culture. Although many believe that antidepressants are supposed to change a seriously depressed person into an outgoing, carefree, productive person, in reality they are meant to relieve the symptoms of depression, thereby allowing the person to return to a normal level of functioning.

Many medicines taken to help a given condition have side effects, and antidepressants are no exception to this rule, with headaches, nervousness, sleeping problems, less of a desire to eat as well as sex disorders possibly occurring. In spite of these issues, antidepressants work well overall and this has caused them to be very popular. Five million people alone in the U.S. consume Prozac, or twenty million worldwide. According to the American Medical Association, an examination of 159 people revealed that using Zoloft for a long time stops severe chronic depression from coming back.

There is some concern that psychotherapy, which is considered to be an effective treatment, is not being used as much as it should be to treat depression. Recently, an analysis of 600 tested patients who had been extremely depressed demonstrated that best treatment procedure is combined psychotherapy and drug treatment.

If you take them as suggested, and add psychotherapy, antidepressants will help depression. While adverse side effects do exist, benefits have been shown to offset drawbacks.