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Using Antidepressants vs. Finding the
Underlying Medical Causes of Depression
By Charles Gant, N.M.D., Ph.D, M.D.
Author of "End Your Addiction Now"
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1. What are the long-term effects of antidepressants on a woman's body?
The answer is that no one knows what the long-term effects of antidepressants are since there are few scientific studies to go on. Antidepressants work by artificially boosting the levels of certain "feel-good" stress hormones in the brain, called neurotransmitters that allow us to cope better with pain and stress.
The general process experienced by most patients entails a psychiatric interview (often performed by a primary care provider), a diagnosis based on symptoms and little in the way of diagnostic studies to search for the actual underlying causes of depression. The better clinicians will at least do a general chemistry panel to rule out liver or kidney disease as the cause, a thyroid panel and a complete blood count to rule out anemia as the cause.
There are at least 15 other causes that I routinely test for, including various hormone imbalances, mineral deficiencies, amino acid deficiencies, food allergies, heavy metal toxicities and essential fatty acid deficiencies to list a few. Because conventionally trained doctors are not educated about molecular medicine, few doctors look for the underlying causes of depression and seem content to treat the symptoms rather find a cure.
Therefore they are left with the next best thing -- to guess which drug will work and give it a try, which is OK for a short term effect. But doctors should then test for the underlying imbalances and gradually wean the patient from the antidepressant as they correct the fundamental causes of depression. Since doctors do not generally know how to find the underlying causes, they are left with having to keep prescribing the drug for long periods not knowing what the long term consequences will be.
I personally believe that this is risky and is not good medicine. If you have a chronic cough, the doctor should find out the cause and cure it, not seal the symptoms over with a cough medicine month after month, year after year. Recognizing that millions of people are now faced with this dilemma of risking long term consequences of antidepressant dependence (they may be hard to stop once you have taken them for a while), Dr. Lewis and I wrote the book "End Your Addiction Now" that offers advice about correcting the imbalances in brain chemistry naturally and also about finding a doctor who will actually do the scientific lab testing to find the causes so that the underlying imbalances can be corrected and patients don't have to risk the unknown consequences of long term antidepressant use.
2. What type of studies have been done and what are the results?
A brief Medline search turned up very little. Most "long-term" studies are done for about a year and the vast majority of studies on antidepressant medication are done for much shorter time spans, weeks to a few months. One recent study published by N Buchman (et. al.) in Clinical Neuropharmacology (2002), volume 25, pp. 55-57, entitled Side effects of long-term treatment with fluoxetine (generic name for Prozac), found that the side effects of restlessness, tension, agitation and sleep disturbances resolved after discontinuing of medication after treatment for 6 to 10 years. Chronic changes in the serotonin neurons called "super sensitivity" may have caused the side effects.
Again we have no idea whatsoever about the long term injury potential of antidepressants, the potential for genetic damage or the potential for addiction. Doctors are dedicated clinicians motivated by compassion and simply do not have much of a choice but to take the risk of long term treatment since they generally are not up to speed yet with the latest advances in molecular medicine which has the technology to discover the actual underlying causes in each person suffering from depression and correct it.
3. Is the brain and body adversely affected by past use of antidepressants?
The potential for injury to the brain or body from any drug use is generally directly proportional to the length of time it is used. With the advances of molecular medicine, I believe that antidepressant medication treatment is an obsolete technology so the risks of treatment are no longer justified.
However, in a psychiatric emergency I have no problems with short term use of antidepressants because the incidence of serious side effects, addiction and death from a drug reaction appears to be fairly low. And if a molecular medicine trained physician can not be found, one should not attempt to stop antidepressant medication on one's own and should instead rely on a physician's help.
If necessary, get an extra copy of our book "End Your Addiction Now," highlight some of the sections for your physician and insist that you want to work towards a natural cure of depression rather than be maintained on drugs for the rest of your life. In my opinion, doctors should ascribe to the ancient traditions of medicine, to first cure the patient and only use a palliative (symptom cover-up) treatment if a cure can not be found. And being true to our more recent traditions of good science, I believe that doctors should investigate deeply the chemistry of every patient to find the causes of disorders and symptoms and correct them.
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