Using Antidepressant Medication in Grief

Have you wondered about asking your doctor for an anti-depressant? Or maybe friends or family members have offered to share some of their meds? The following article provides some practical advice about antidepressants and clarifies that the depression of grief is not the same as clinical depression.

Using Antidepressant Medication in Grief

Here are a couple quotes from the article to encourage you to read it fully:
It is usually inadvisable to give antidepressant medications to people undergoing an acute grief reaction. These anitdepressants take a long time to work, they rarely relieve normal grief symptoms, and they could pave the way for an abnormal grief response, though this has yet to be proved through controlled studies. The exception would be in cases of major depressive episodes.

Normal grief is neither an illness nor a pathological condition; it is a normal response to losing a loved one.

Like I said on Monday, become a student of your own grief and learn all you can. The article today is from a secular group, so don't think I'm endorsing everything you'll see in their links and advice as a whole, but I think we can find it useful for certain facts about grief and medication.

Be very careful with medications and take them only under advisement of your doctor. Resist the pushy relatives who want to "share" their anti-depressents with you. Write down the name of the drug, and maybe that will help fend them off, but do not "borrow" their pills.

Above all, educate yourself. Don't just assume you need an anti-depressant or sleeping pills. And don't assume you don't need them, either. Learn the pros and cons, and opinions of several good advisors and professionals before getting prescriptions. What do you think? Feel free to add your comments, your experience will provide insight and help to many!

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed. Proverbs 15:22
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