Feel help: Ive been diagnosed ‘ depressed’, and I do feel like I am especially now im on these anti-depressants the doctor put me on last week. - Help.com

If you are contemplating suicide, hurting yourself, or you are seriously depressed: please, seek professional help!

Call this hotline (1-800-273-8255) operated by our friends at the
Suicide Prevention Lifeline, anytime, for free, professional, and
confidential assistance. While other Help.com users are likely to reply
to your post, please make sure you understand that your use of Help.com
falls under our TOS.

Note: I’m a robot that the Help.com staff created. If this response is in error, I apologize, please ignore it.

I got depressed when my farther died and I refused to go on the antidepressants.

What will help is the friendship and the support from the people you love.

Being able to just site down in mums arms until I went to sleep did me more good than any tablets or drugs would ever on done.

In my opinion depression is not a illness or a disease but a frame of mind.
It can be brought on by a combination of different factors all collecting in your subconscious and as you begin to understand the real issues that are making you depressed then YOU can change and me the person you are.

Looking so deeply into yourself is hard and you may want professional help to do it.

But it can be done….and with time and understanding it will.

With all my love Sophie.

With medicine for say pain or ? I would say to give it time.But with depression and the like-NO,you really need to contact your doctor,don’t leave anything out and don’t play down the symptoms as if its not so bad.Trust me on this.I know what Im talking about.They may tell you to wait it out,and they may be right ,but only you know how much you can take. DO NOT Wait till the last minute either.There may be phone tag and things that take time.Time is precious when your suffering.I learned the hard way that a person can’t be a Procrastinator and depressed at the same time.I would not want anyone to go through what I have.

Also,If you weren’t told,It may take up to 2 weeks for you to feel the effects,whether or not working.Depending on the med(s). Just something to keep in mind. And doctors are human,they can misdiagnose and choose the medicine that may not suit your needs.What i’m saying is Listen to your body,sometimes it can speak volumes.No-one knows your body more than you.

Anonymous wrote:
Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer…. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.

This isn’t helpful.

These things are good for depression:
Vitamin D3
St. John’s Wort
Niacinamide (not Niacin)
Sunshine of course
Laughter!!!
Clouds
Earth

It does take time for the anti-depressants to work. They do not solve your problems they just help calm your mind. You still need to work on what ever is making you feel depressed.

Unfortunately, as others have said, antidepressants do take time. They generally work by restoring a number of lost connections in your brain (brain scans show whole areas of the brains of people with depression that shrink and can be restored with antidepressants and/or therapy), and this doesn’t happen overnight. However, ALL doctors should KNOW to warn their patient’s that they may have increase in suicidal thoughts and the like, and if your doctor is not doing this, or not scheduling follow-up appointments in the couple of weeks after you started your antidepressant, then change doctors to someone who knows what they are dealing with.

Although I agree with a few of florie’s suggestions, especially getting out in the sunshine, as well as exercising which has been proven to help depression, be really careful about what supplements you take, particularly St Johns Wort as it can interact badly with your medication.

Horrible although it is for you, do persevere with your medications. You may have to switch them if you are still feeling bad after a month, I was on one and just couldn’t get rid of feeling like a zombie, but switched to something else and have felt fine every since.

I can tell you for certain, both as a person with depression and a neuroscientist, depression is as real and illness as diabetes or heart disease. There are a lot of non-medical things you can do, such as getting a good therapist, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real, measurable illness, that for some people will mean having to be on antidepressants for the rest of their lives to enable their neurochemicals to keep in balance.

Sophie - saying depression is just a state of mind is very unhelpful. It must have been a terrible time after your dad died, but you were grieving and this is not the same as depression. Believe me I had the biggest surprise when, despite me being the happiest I had been, having been through remarkable therapy, been on, and then got myself off of, antidepressants, I still got depressed. It was not situational, it was not because I was covering something up or failing to see something, it was simply because, similar to other medical illnesses, my brain just couldn’t get the right balance of neurochemicals and it was damaging my circuitry - this is a real, proven condition.

Are you relying soley on meds and therapy? the reason I ask is it takes more than that,A combination of these aids plus getting the knowledge and understanding of the illness or disorder and applying it to help yourself is what i recommend.And have you talked with your doctor about the meds.that should be your first step when there are any changes in your moods.

All these things and getting to know God is what helped me,and others.