Antidepressants on Kevin.MD

Dheeraj Raina is a healthy who has a blog post on KevinMD called "How an Antidepressant Can Hurt Your Patient."

The post is directed at primary care docs and talks about the danger and downside of prescribing anti-depressants. Too much use as 'feel good' drugs without careful consideration of the diagnosis, appropriate treatment with adjunctive psychotherapy, and the risk of manic induction and suicide.

It's probably not likely that every patient with anxiety and depression will end up seeing a healthy. Obviously, we at Shrink Rap don't think antidepressants should be doled out mindlessly--- if primary care docs are going to prescribe them, they should--

Know how to diagnose depression.
Know how to use the medications. This is not as easy as it might sound: Antidepressants take time to work and the dosing requires titration. Sometimes they need to be changed, increased, augmented. If the first try at a standard dose works, you can call it a day---but this is why the meds have the rap for being only as good as placebo. They don't work if you don't know how to use them and one size doesn't fit all.
There are risks, side effects, adverse reactions, and contraindications.
With psychotherapy, time, and support, there are people who won't need treatment with medications and those options get bypassed when a script gets written in a quick visit.

PS. I agree with Dr. Raina that this can't be done in a 15 minute office visit.