Benefits of Antidepressants, the Complete List of Benefits!

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Posted by Prescription Hope - See Editorial Guidelines (Last Updated On: Tue Mar 14 2023)

In general, antidepressants are the main medication or treatment plan used for the treatment of depression. Patients ideally need to understand the benefits of antidepressants.

So, in this article, we’ll give a clear understanding of the benefits of antidepressants and go through the details surrounding the benefits of antidepressants.

But first, here’s a quick reference for you to take away, then we’ll get more into the explanation.

Here are the benefits of antidepressants?

• Treating depression
• Avoid and keep suicidal thoughts under control
• Boosting energy for better physical health
• Improving sleep patterns
• Maintaining a positive mindset
• Improving appetite
• Aiding a healthy pregnancy
• Reducing negative bias
• Strengthens ability to cope with stress
• Improves cardiovascular and immune systems

The improvement of antidepressants in the US has now led to a whole range of treatments from overcoming anxiety to obsessive-compulsive disorders to eating disorders, and many other psychiatric conditions.

Since the 1980s, the US has been enjoying the benefits of antidepressants. Especially commonly used antidepressants such as:

• Fluoxetine (Prozac)
• Sertraline (Zoloft)
• Paroxetine (Paxil)
• Fluvoxamine (Luvox)
• Citalopram (Celexa)
• Escitalopram (Lexapro)

These are just some of the most commonly prescribed antidepressants around the world and ones that are available from us here at Prescription Hope for just $60.00 per month through Prescription Hope’s medication access service.

In general terms, antidepressants initially benefit a patient by slowly relieving the symptoms of depression and other related health conditions resulting from depression.

Using antidepressants can help with the prevention and control of any worsening conditions, and aid the state of depression a person is going through.

There are many other benefits of antidepressants that are focused on treating or benefiting patients to help them to “get out of depression,” and the related conditions that can complicate a daily lifestyle.

Here are the common and most powerful benefits of antidepressants are as follows.

Treating Depression and Related Health Outcomes

Treating depression is perhaps the core benefit of antidepressants, as that’s what it’s usually prescribed for.

Depression, in a nutshell, is a mood disorder that causes a persistent or continuous feeling of disinterest in the world around them, including work, people, and other areas of their life.

This is sometimes called a “major depressive disorder” or “clinical depression.” This health condition affects how one feels, thinks, and acts, which leads to a variety of emotional and physical problems.

This medical condition can cause several complications when trying to lead a normal daily life, making a sufferer feel as if “life isn’t worth living.”

As a rough approximation, around 15% of untreated cases of depression cases result in suicide.

Improves Sleep Patterns

It’s commonly considered that a person’s sleep patterns will indicate if there’s any sign that they’re going through some form of depression.

Many patients going through depression complain about sleeping complications from an inability to fall asleep, to less sleep, daytime fatigue, sleep that never feels enough, trouble getting back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night to staying awake all hours of the night. Depression can complicate a person’s sleep patterns greatly.

A continued pattern of inadequate sleep can develop into insomnia, a health condition where it’s challenging to obtain adequate sleep.

These sleeping troubles don’t just end there. When a person gets less sleep, they can often develop several other complications. This includes extreme tiredness, inactivity, and loss of energy, difficulty concentrating, or even difficulty making decisions.

Antidepressants can help normalize a person’s sleeping patterns. This is because some antidepressants contain sedative properties that can be used to help support good sleeping routines. Especially some types of antidepressants like doxepin, mirtazapine, and trazodone can rapidly increase sleep.

These sleep benefits can work so well that sometimes over sedation is also a possible risk, and one may get more than the required hours for a healthy sleep routine.

Therefore, the best benefit of antidepressants for sleep comes from starting with a slower and lower dose. It’s also advised to administer and monitor one’s dose before bedtime to know which dose proves to be the most effective.

At the same time, this benefit may be less effective with antidepressants prescribed as a short-term treatment plan.

Keep Suicidal Thoughts Under Control

The main reasons for developing suicidal and other self-destructive emotions, thoughts, and feelings are, of course, mainly caused by the unstable emotional balance caused by depression.

When mental health is unstable, and the emotional sense is imbalanced, a patient can quickly feel overwhelmed by painful emotions, especially emotions like sadness, loneliness, and so on.

When these emotions set in, and there’s an inability to control them with a healthy mind, it can make an individual depressed, or see death as the only way out.

When a person takes antidepressants, the mediation can help balance these unstable and imbalanced emotions.

Antidepressants work by balancing the chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that are responsible for affecting one’s mood and emotions.

So, when these chemicals are balanced with the help of antidepressants, it gradually improves a patient’s mood and ability to handle emotions. This will help control their thought patterns and actions away from suicide and other self-destructive options.

Boosting Energy for Better Physical Health

Antidepressants can boost energy and metabolism significantly. Many believe this increase in metabolism and energy is one of the core reasons why patients using antidepressants gain weight. An increase in one’s metabolism and energy may increase one’s appetite or may give one a renewed interest in various foods, potentially leading to weight gain. However, weight gain in this case is not always negative.

When a person struggles with depression, they generally have a lack of energy and a slower metabolism. Therefore, they often struggle to focus on one’s physical health.

Activities such as taking medications at the right time, engaging in other recommended physical activities, and even visiting the doctor’s office may not interest them because of lower energy caused by depression.

What antidepressants do is boosts energy levels, causing the brain to focus much more on one’s physical health, and keeping fit, active, and energized with even small physical activities. This energy is also supported by the improved metabolism antidepressants bring about.

Improving a Positive Mindset

A positive mindset is important for a healthy and happy lifestyle. Even for coping with the normal challenges we face in a day, a positive mindset is very important.

Easy to say, but during bouts of depression, having a positive mindset can be very difficult to achieve or maintain. This inability to develop a positive mindset does impact not only a daily lifestyle but also the health choices and life decisions an individual makes.

Paying less attention to your health and health choices because of the lack of interest or a negative mindset can not only worsen other medical conditions you may have but may also lead to the development of other medical conditions.

It’s also believed that patients going through depression even find it difficult to follow a doctor’s instructions because of this less positive mindset. This is because a depressed mind with unbalanced emotions would always think on the negative end.

This means the patient would continuously think that taking medications or following a doctor’s advice will not bring any change, and so the healthcare choices are overlooked.

So, when antidepressants balance out the chemicals in the brain, followed by the balance of emotions, it becomes easier to see the world with a positive mindset.

Negative Bias

This positive mindset brings hope to life and reduces negative bias in interpretation and memory where emotional events are concerned.

Many depressed individuals tend to interpret incidents and outcomes more negatively than they are – or could be.

In addition to this, they also find it easier to connect or relate every other incident to a past awful incident that took place, including the event that could have caused the person depression.

This means that every other experience a depressed person goes through is interpreted negatively and related to past, unpleasant events. This thinking pattern increases negative biases, leading to overthinking, which may also cause the sleep troubles a depressed individual goes through.

Antidepressants can trigger a person’s mind to restore the balance with these negative biases. Meaning, among the benefits of antidepressants, is the ability to restore a balance in how a person’s experiences and situations are interpreted and remembered, allowing the free flow of positive information.

This shift in the brain antidepressants create is accompanied by certain biological changes in the brain. These biological changes that allow positivity are visible and can be observed using imaging techniques (such as magnetic resonance imaging).

Strengthens Ability to Cope With Stress

Stressful life events often cause depression. But there’s no exact roadmap on what kind of stress brings about depression.

However, the hormonal stress response system persistently increases the primary stress hormone called “cortisol” in depressed patients. It doesn’t stop there, though. This increase in the level of cortisol directly supports the development of depressive symptoms or worsens existing symptoms.

This is because a high level of cortisol reduces the number of normal brain cells, and it’s functioning. This is why stress is a severe condition of depression.

What antidepressants do is dampen down the hormonal response system. This will reduce and bring back the cortisol level to normal. This would then, in turn, rescue the normal brain cells and its functioning from the effects of the stress.

As such, the benefits of antidepressants means they do not only help the resolution of current depression but will also avoid the possible rise of future depression as a response to stress hormones.

Antidepressants do this by stimulating the birth of new cells (neurogenesis) in areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus, that regulate stress response.

In a person showing no signs of depression, this neurogenesis is reduced by stress and depression and is increased with the help of antidepressants.

Improves Cardiovascular and Immune Systems

As depression is increased by stress, the stress hormones speed one’s heart rate, causing the blood vessels to tighten. This will put one’s body in a prolonged state of urgencies, possibly leading to heart diseases and other heart complications.

The recurrence of cardiovascular problems is very likely with patients going through depression, as well as patients who smoke, have diabetes, have high blood pressure, or have high cholesterol.

And also, untreated depression will increase the risk of dying following a heart attack because of the unbalance of stress hormones.

Aside from this, depression and stress together make an individual’s immune system weaker. A weak immune system increases vulnerability to infections and diseases.

One of the benefits of antidepressants is that it can control and balance the function of stress hormones. This would then help keep your immune system healthier and more stable, while also helping reduce the potential of cardiovascular diseases due to stress.

Ease Pregnancy Complications

When a pregnant woman is also going through depression, it becomes hard for them to take optimal parental care.

Even eating the right food and making healthy choices may be seen as uninteresting for pregnant women. This increased depression contributes to premature birth, low birth weight, reduced fetal growth, and other complications for the baby.

Unstable or untreated depression also increases the risk of postpartum depression and other difficulties in the mother trying to bond with the baby.

Antidepressants help to control and keep such symptoms of depression under control while also preventing these symptoms from worsening during pregnancy. This stabilization of depression symptoms benefits a healthy pregnancy and an even healthy baby.

Improves Appetite

Many who use antidepressants experience weight gain. This mainly comes from the ability for antidepressants to trigger a person’s ability to act on their thoughts and instincts, again by boosting energy and metabolism.

For example, when a person is depressed, they lack the energy to act on their instincts. This is why they show less interest in eating daily meals or eating the right foods at the right time. Alternatively, others may over-indulge while going through depression, which is called stress eating.

For those who lose their appetite during a state of depression, antidepressants can trigger their ability to act on thoughts by boosting energy. This means when they feel hungry, they will have the feeling to go and eat and will also have the energy to put that into practice.

Therefore, this improves one’s appetite for a healthy body and is why many say they gain weight while on antidepressants. This often means that they’re returning to their normal weight before they went through depression.

To Close

There are numerous benefits to taking antidepressants, and indeed numerous studies have shown marked improvement in a greater number of patients than those who were given a placebo.

For a full and detailed discussion around depression, or any symptoms you may be having that point to depression, always consult with your doctor or relevant medical practitioner.

If you are struggling to afford any of your prescribed drugs, then Prescription Hope may be able to help. We work with pharmaceutical companies to provide patients with the medications they need at a set, affordable cost. Enroll with us today and start saving money.