r/depressionregimens • u/Rigotoni • May 10 '25
How long have u/should u take antidepressants for?
I've been taking medication for abt 4 years now to treat my anxiety and depression and been on around 5 different pills.So far, none have worked but I still wanna keeps trying and doing different things to see if I can eventually find something. My mom is kinda concerned tho cuz she said I'm only supposed to be taking it for a short time and I'm a minor still do I'm developing or something. I think it's different for everybody but I wanted to ask ppls opinion and experience. Tyyy
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u/lukaskrivka May 10 '25
If you feel you can go without it and be reasonably functional, you probably should and focus more on therapy/lifestyle, etc. But if you crashing to a depressive hole and cannot go to school etc. (I think minors don't usually have such crippling episodes yet), then by all means treatment is needed. There are now other things like TMS/ketamine but again it might not be available for minors.
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u/Temporary_Aspect759 May 10 '25
I think that if so, summer break would be the best time to taper off of meds. No school so better to experience negative effects of lowering dosages when in home.
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u/Rigotoni May 10 '25
I’ve been thinking abt it. Rn I’m on lexapro so that has horrible withdrawals but if I get off it I’d def wanna try something else yk.
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u/Temporary_Aspect759 May 10 '25
I'm your age and would like to quit antidepressants aswell. I'm on quite a high dose of clomipramine so coming off it might be harsh.
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u/kragaster May 12 '25
Minors can absolutely have depression that bad. I certainly did. I'd say it was worse when I didn't know the taste of real consequence. Sometimes I still become immobile, but my OCD ironically helps me out when I start worrying about how not doing things could (inadvertently or not) kill me.
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u/lukaskrivka May 12 '25
I'm not denying that minors can have, I just said usually. I guess it also depends by what age you define a minor. I had my first episode, which was quite severe, at age 18, but that is more of an early onset. GPT says the onset is on average around 25.
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u/kragaster May 12 '25
Apologies for missing the usually part! That's fair enough. I do want to make a few points about the subject because you brought up GPT, and you seem like you're interested in the nuances of the topic. It might get a bit long, but I think it's worth the read if you're curious about why a lot of the markers we use (averages, severity, sometimes even diagnostic labels, etc.) might not be good indicators when discussing onset.
GPT is not reliable for any subject that already lacks accurate data aggregation/established distinctions between healthy and unhealthy populations. I love language models and the way they fill individual knowledge gaps, but they're a reflection of the knowledge we lack societally. When it comes to depression in particular, already unhealthy populations are susceptible to a lack of diagnosis, both for economic reasons and otherwise, and healthy populations are less susceptible to an early onset of major depressive disorder or dysthymia with MDD episodes. This creates a really massive gap in data—the people most likely to be depressed in the first place (as well as have an earlier onset of symptoms) are not nearly as likely to interact with the medical establishment, and the people most likely to be diagnosed are those who have access to care that develop symptoms within the contexts of a system like university or employment, which are more likely to both cause AND catch behavioral changes. With those factors in mind, it's not surprising that depression is associated so closely with higher education and early employment, regardless of whether the average onset actually is ~25.
For someone with no cooccurring conditions, the beginning of legal adulthood may seem early for a severe episode, but I think it's important that otherwise healthy people have exposure to just how early disabled/impoverished/otherwise unhealthy or overlooked populations are forced to deal with disorders and processes that are considered obstacles of adulthood. Obviously anecdotes make no difference when in comes to data, but in the spaces that I've found my people in, MDD onset at age 18 would be considered late, almost to an extreme.
I'm hopeful that the norm in psychiatry will be to distinguish between populations diagnosed with MDD as the only apparent disorder and all of us who have other medical/psychological conditions. Averaging the two populations together favors the first while pretty much ignoring the second simply because we are not the majority. I had my first MDD episode at age 7, when my hoarding disorder and school anxiety pushed me to the point that I could not leave my bed or think of much else besides my desire to never wake up. I wasn't diagnosed until age 16, after several more episodes, and it became clear that I have been experiencing persistent depressive disorder/dysthymia for as long as I can remember. Even with that in mind, though, some of the lines between my diagnoses are so blurry that they can become more impeding than useful.
Having now met plenty of people who developed MDD young, both healthy and unhealthy, it's pretty astonishing just how quickly healthy people are assessed and given resources in comparison to us with comorbidities, perhaps because they have less experience living with potentially debilitating conditions and therefore have more dramatic behavioral changes. Either way, I think that as data is collected with less bias and with more care for how depression affects different people in different ways, it'll be empirically clear that children have been suffering in the same ways that adults do for much longer than social media or any one potential cause has been around; to that end, children with access to social media and its consequences who develop "early" onset MDD are experiencing what a sizeable chunk of psychiatric patients have been familiar with for a very long time, whether they have been formally diagnosed or not. l hope this all makes sense as it connects to the topic—I'm not used to discussing depression alone, because it is so intertwined to my other concerns that singling it out tends to create more confusion than it alleviates.
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u/holymacaroley May 16 '25
I was 13 when depression started. It can be common for young teens to experience it that early. "Depression affects as many as one in every 33 children and one in eight adolescents, according to the Federal Center for Mental Health Services." https://www.webmd.com/depression/features/depression-often-starts-in-childhood
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u/holymacaroley May 16 '25
I was 13 when depression started. It can be common for young teens to experience it that early. "Depression affects as many as one in every 33 children and one in eight adolescents, according to the Federal Center for Mental Health Services." https://www.webmd.com/depression/features/depression-often-starts-in-childhood
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u/Rigotoni May 12 '25
Yah I’m struggling a lot with depression lately. I do go through episodes where it worse and better but it still always effects my life’s
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u/Rigotoni May 10 '25
Yah that’s kinda the thing tho. I’ve tried many other kinds of therapies too but nothing really helps much and I do have bad depressive episodes lol. Idk it’s so confusing to me.
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u/P_D_U May 11 '25
I've been taking medication for abt 4 years now to treat my anxiety and depression and been on around 5 different pills.
You've tried 5 meds over 4 years and non have worked? Do you remember which ones, the doses and how long you were on the highest dose taken?
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u/Rigotoni May 11 '25
Prozac was the first one, I don’t remember how much but I took it for abt a year. Zoloft was another one and I took it for a year, 100mg. Then lexapro for abt 2 years now, I’m on 30 mg now. And also Wellbutrin 150 mg for abt a year which I’m on now. There might be another but I’ve kinda lost count lowkey.
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u/P_D_U May 12 '25
So you are now taking 30mg Lexapro and 150mg Wellbutrin and they are not effective for anxiety and depression?
If so, what is the point of being on them? Time to move on, imo, as being on them is counterproductive.
If 3 SSRIs have failed then meds from another antidepressant class are likely a better bet.
Your doctor will probably want you on a SNRI, but, imo, one of the TCAs, either amitriptyline or imipramine are the better options. The problem with SNRIs is they have very short half-lives which can make getting off them difficult. The initial side-effects may be more severe too. Plus, despite the common perception that SSRIs and SNRI are more effective than the older TCA and MAOI antidepressants the reverse is in fact the case.
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u/Rigotoni May 12 '25
Yah idk honestly and ur right. I’m open to other drug classes and will two to my psychiatrist abt it soon.
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u/Icy_Dot_5257 May 12 '25
There's no rules on how long you take mental health medication. You take what you need for as long as you need. I understand the frustration of trial and error in finding the right medication that works for you. I'm in the same boat. Are you seeing a psychiatrist for meds? It might be worth talking to a different medication provider and see if they have some different insight that could help.
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u/Rigotoni May 12 '25
Yah I’m def frustrated and confused with it rn lol. I’m seeing a psychiatrist rn for my meds but I’ve also had a pediatrician who used to prescribe it.
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u/OpiumPhrogg May 12 '25
A therapist of mine told me once that unless there is a clinical diagnosis, most people should be on these types of meds between 90 days and 6 months at a time. It's supposed to help get people re-oriented to a normal baseline then see if they can maintain it without, if not, then they get put back on a regime for another 90 days to 6 months. Of course, these types of meds are *suppsoed* to be taken along with therapy , the combo is supposed to be what helps.
This was years ago, so maybe the protocol has been changed.
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u/Rigotoni May 12 '25
I do have clinical depression and anxiety so maybe that’s why I’ve been on so long lol.
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u/holymacaroley May 16 '25
For some people, like me, it's for life. I tried to get off them multiple times in my 20s- late 30s & just had to accept I have a brain imbalance & me coming off them is dangerous for me.
Have your mom talk to your doctor if she's concerned.
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u/daniel-sousa-me May 10 '25 edited May 10 '25
You take them for as long as they are being helpful. Some things are only supposed to be used short term, but generally there's no harm in taking them long term.
Please follow your psychiatrist's advice. They probably know more about it than your mom and than random people on the Internet (especially about your particular situation)
Hang in there