Can Drugs for Depression and Anxiety End up Causing It?
It’s a kind of paradox in psychiatric medicine – a drug that’s used to treat a certain disorder ends up causing the very symptoms it is supposed to erase. It’s a quality shared by popular drugs like Zoloft and Celexa that are used to treat both depression and anxiety. On the way to helping you, these sometimes also end up causing anxiety. People often wonder how this is possible.
It was around a half-century ago that researchers first noted how antidepressants also had the effect of helping with anxiety. The only problem there was, that antidepressants don’t have this unintended effect in everyone. Only some people experience them. The flip side of that coin is, that sometimes, just as they can help with anxiety in some people and not others, they can cause anxiety in some people and not others. Antidepressants causing depression, stimulants getting people all relaxed, are all common effects of psychiatric drugs. It just happens because even as people are similar, when you go deep into the structural level of the brain, different people can have drastically different makeups. Each person has a biology that is quite unique. Just as no two people are alike, the nature of their depression can vary widely too.
Among med school students, a popular way of explaining this paradox goes like this. Let’s say you’re in a car; the action of depressing the gas pedal doesn’t always produce the same result. Depending on which gear you are in, the action of pressing down on the gas can make the car surge forward or backward. With a chemical that’s designed to do one thing, you can get often a result that’s the opposite of what you intended, depending on the biology of the brain. Going further in the depression and anxiety analogy of what you see in a car, you don’t know what result you’ll get depressing the gas pedal unless you know about the kind of road you’re on. You could be on a road that is flat, one that slopes upward, or one that slopes down. You’ll get very different results depending on which way the incline goes. You can’t really tell how depression and anxiety medicine can operate on a person until you are able to really correctly determine from that person’s life experiences, the kind of stresses they feel, their temperament, their personality, and so on.
If an antidepressant you take ends up making you terribly anxious, there are several possible options open to you. The anxiety might point to a case where you were prescribed too high a dose. Starting on a much lower doses and raising it gradually could certainly remedy the situation. And of course, no one should discount the kind of powerful effect psychotherapy can have.