Health News. Lots of resources and information

They make a tremendous difference. Correctly prescribed and taken, antidepressants generate major improvement in 65% to 80% of depressed patients. Along with lithium and antianxiety medications, the new antidepressants have successfully treated millions of patients worldwide and enabled them to function normally or at least better. No longer need lives be wasted in devastating depression or in destructive uncontrolled manic episodes.

Moreover, these medications have an effect mat extends beyond the lives of those for whom they are prescribed. Depression is not only a personal and family/societal problem, it is also a problem that results in lost time on the job, divorce, hospitalization, suicide, secondary alcoholism, and drug addiction. Depression and other mood disorders waste lives— and money. According to a recent study, the annual costs of depression in the United States total approximately $43.7 billion.

As William Styron remarks in Darkness Visible, depression is a “true wimp of a word for such a major illness”. Depressed people visit their doctors three times as often as do patients without a psychiatric disorder and they spend more days in bed man do people with hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, and back pain.

Yet, with a frequency that is shocking—50% to 60% of the time in primary care settings, 60% of the tune in HMOs—the disorder goes undiagnosed. This is tragic, because when depression is recognized and appropriately treated with medication and/or therapy, § it can be eliminated most of the time—or at controlled.

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