If you are taking a prescription drug and develop symptoms of mania or depression, it could be a side effect of the prescription. The right thing to do is to tell your doctor what’s going on; the wrong thing is to seek another prescription drug to treat the mania or depression, because antidepressants can quickly lead to dependence or addiction and the need for drug detox when you want to stop taking them.
Literally dozens of prescription drugs used for a wide variety of conditions can produce side effects mimicking depression or mania – and in some cases, such as the drug Antabuse used to treat alcoholism, can mimic both. Abusing alcohol itself can cause depression – serious depression – and should itself be treated with drug detox and rehab. Throwing an antidepressant medication in on top of an alcohol problem is really asking for trouble and a pretty much unavoidable future visit to a medical drug detox center.
There are, in fact, so many drugs that can cause side effects of mania or depression – almost all popular drugs prescribed in the billions every year – we can’t possibly list them for you here. If you really want to know what they are, make a quick Internet search for “drugs that cause mania and depression” and you’ll find lengthy articles and lists.
The best thing to do if you’re taking a prescription medication is to see your doctor at the first sign of abnormal feelings of mania or depression. Such side effects should be known to prescribing physicians, who usually change prescriptions or adjust the dosage to minimize them. Above all, don’t let your doctor prescribe mood stabilizers and/or antipsychotic medications to treat the side effects of the first drug. Drugs that cause these side effects are bad enough on their own – drug detox centers treat them all the time – but taking another drug on top of a first one can lead to even more complications.
Some of the prescription drugs that cause depression are themselves potentially habit forming, drugs that can lead to physical dependence and often require a medical drug detox program to get through withdrawal. The worst of these are the benzodiazepines, central nervous system depressants usually used to treat anxiety and insomnia or to relax muscles. Examples are Ativan, Dalman, Halcion, Klonopin, Librium, Valium and Xanax. People with benzodiazepines dependency are frequent patients at drug detox centers across the country.
So here’s the ABC’s for anyone taking a prescription drug:
If you’re taking a prescription drug and start feeling depressed, a little crazy, or sped up, see your doctor immediately. Hundreds of drugs can cause these feelings, and some require medical drug detox to withdraw from safely.
Tell your doctor to verify whether or not your prescription could be causing your symptoms.
If so, tell him or her to change the prescription – you want to avoid a second prescription just to treat the side effects of the first one. And you don’t need the added time and expense of drug detox - which those second drugs could lead to.
The side effects of antidepressants and antipsychotics are murderous, literally as well as figuratively. In addition to a long list of uncomfortable side effects, antidepressants have been linked to suicides, violence and murder – places you do not want to go, just as you don’t want to have to go through a drug detox program.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Rod MacTaggart
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