depression treatment options

See a professional to determine the level of your depression; discuss other treatment options to use in combination with—or in place of—antidepressant drugs.

Medication doesn't always work for depression, but there are other options.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—When you come down with a bacterial infection, doctors run tests and treat you with a specific antibiotic designed to target that bug. When you're living with depression, or what seems to be depression, the fix is nowhere near that staightforward, and it's certainly not going to clear up in seven to 10 days. In fact, part of treating depression is luck, a guessing game where a doctor tinkers with drugs and dosages with the goal of producing a significant improvement. The problem is, more and more studies are finding that in people who are mildly to moderately depressed, antidepressants don't work any better than placebo treatments.

THE DETAILS: The latest evidence along these lines was published this month in a study of medication for depression published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That report found that even people taking a placebo—"fake" medication given for the purposes of comparison to the real thing—felt better. Part of the reason is that patients who use even fake medicine will take their depressive symptoms seriously and act on their concern about their own mental health, says study author Jay Fournier, a graduate student in the department of psychology at University of Pennsylvania. "For patients in the mild and moderate ranges, the active ingredients of the medications don't seem to be able to add much to these effects," he says.

Since the majority of people being treated for depression fall into the mild-to-moderate category, the research suggests that many depressed Americans are being overmedicated for symptoms that could go away on their own, or could improve with nonpharmaceutical interventions like therapy and changes in diet and exercise routines. Fournier stresses that his results, and many previous studies, found that patients with severe depression do experience large improvements from taking antidepressant drugs.

Read on to find out how to make sure your antidepressants are doing their job.