Will antidepressants make you happier? (my experience)
Do antidepressants fix anxiety and depression?
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The most important video I’ve made and something I had to come to terms with myself over the previous months. I used to wonder will antidepressants make me happier? I would think about things I could achieve if I wasn't so grey, numb, switched-off and distant. If only I was happier.
⏰ Timecodes ⏰
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - My experience of Sertraline (Zoloft)
01:25 - Antidepressants don't make you happy
02:02 - Learning to swim (feel normal)
05:09 - Real life
This is a video for everyone on antidepressants or who is about to start. In fact it's probably for people say at home thinking about their mental health and knowing they should get help but struggling to make that first phone call to a GP to talk about their depression. Happiness seems like a distant concept when your don't feel anything.
When I started taking Sertraline - a commonly prescribed antidepressant - I had an idea of what was going to happen and generally it involved feeling happier and a vision of smiling more and being more proactive. Sound familiar? I KNEW that my default setting couldn't be this person I had become; I remembered someone who was confident and happy, social and brave. Not someone who was lonely, scared and unable to function properly.
The unfortunate truth is that antidepressants don’t make you happier BUT before you close the video and throw your antidepressants away. Bear with me! I have some happy news to share!
Antidepressants aren’t called happy-makers - they work to combat depression and other mental illness by supporting the effectiveness of serotonin in your brain. This allows you to to function more effectively. They don’t create false happiness but they provide opportunit
Imagine a line called “normal” - this is the base line and let’s imagine it’s the surface of a swimming pool. Depression, anxiety etc pulls us under the surface and makes it hard to find space to breathe. Occasionally we might pop our head above surface but generally our default position is fighting to reach the surface.
Now imagine antidepressants are a rubber ring. They bring us to the surface where we can float. We aren’t fighting for breath so much even thought we might occasionally slip under water. From our rubber ring we can see the world more clearly, communicate more effectively with the people around us and because we are not expending energy keeping afloat we can start to think.
We might still be scared of the water - and that’s OK!
Antidepressants don’t teach us to swim.
They give us the capacity to learn. They give us the space to find people to help us and throw another rubber ring if we slip under again. They show us where the ladder is so if, by our own steam, we can climb out of the pool and grab an ice cream or spend time with a new friend.
We might still be afraid of the water - but that’s OK. We have a rubber ring now.