Coping with Depression Has Become Easier
If you’re young, you may not remember when depression was still a mystifying condition referred to as “melancholia.” It was thought to be a woman’s disease, caused by a woman’s need for attention and by unrequited love in her middle age. Nobody really knew just what to do with depression. Sigmund Freud treated it with cocaine injections. Bad idea. Coping with depression was frustrating to both doctors and patients.
In the past half-century, medical research yielded a wealth of information about what causes depression, who gets it, and how it can be successfully treated. Coping with depression became a whole lot easier and faster. In the early days, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), or “shock treatments” provided relief from serious, suicidal depression but were very unpleasant, causing a grand mal seizure and memory loss.
The first medications for coping with depression were the tri-cyclic drugs like Elavil and Pamelor. Research found that depression was caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, particularly the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine. The old-style tricyclics worked very well to relieve depression, but had some unpleasant side effects like dryness of the mouth and other mucous membranes and sedation. Then came the new Serotonin Selective Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs. These drugs increased the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, usually putting depression into full, sustained remission within six months.
In addition to medications, ECT made a big comeback; it was still regarded as a very effective treatment for severe depression that doesn’t respond to drug therapy. Today, an ECT patient is placed under general anesthesia and has no traumatic memories of the procedure. When the electricity is administered, the seizure cannot be observed except for a twitching or curling of the toes.
