Can Antidepressants Stop Working?

From the creator

It’s estimated that 25% of people develop tolerance to their antidepressant medications. This medication tolerance issue was first noticed in the early 1980’s when we were using Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors, called MAOis. These were very effective drugs, but you had to adhere to a really strict diet of no cheese and other things or else you could have a dangerous hypertensive crisis. Meaning your blood pressure could shoot up dangerously high. Then in 1988 we got Prozac or fluoxetine as the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. This was innovative because now we had another option that promised to have less side effects. But it didn’t take long before we started to see the same problem. Then the term was called Prozac poop out. The classic way this looks is that you take the medication and get a full remission of your symptoms, meaning your symptoms resolve and you’re back to where you were before you started taking the medication. Then somewhere around 4 months to a year, you start feeling bad again even though you made no change to the medication. The medical term for this is antidepressant tachyphylaxis. Which is defined as a rapid development of tolerance or immunity to the effects of a drug Why isn’t this talked about more? Because it’s complicated and for a while, we weren’t sure if this was a true tolerance build up or if your return of symptoms was due to other reasons. Here are 5 other reasons you can have a change in your response to your medication. 1.

Published 2019-10-09 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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