Antidepressants Research Paper

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Depression is a very common mental illness found in the everyday common man that is not taken as seriously as other mental illnesses. According to an article found in the Daily Mail by Jane Street-Porter, depression is a ‘misery movement’ that “...rapidly gathered momentum and in recent months it's become apparent that, along with the Sam Cam handbag, the latest must-have accessory is a big dose of depression.” This concept or idea of depression being trivial may result from not truly understanding what depression is and how it can affect someone. In fact, depression is a leading mental health cause of disability and a major cause of morbidity and mortality (Ashcroft et al. 1). But, there are also some people who believe that depression is …show more content…

They are defined as anything, and especially a drug, used to prevent or treat depression. Similar to the majority of medications, new antidepressants are created and with these new antidepressants come new side effects and sometimes more harmful ones when compared to older antidepressants. As with all drugs, the use of antidepressants requires monitoring for side effects, and suicide should be considered as a possible side effect of the newer antidepressants, particularly in children and adolescents. Also, antidepressants should not be used unless the depression is severe and/or other treatments have failed. This explains why antidepressants are not the first treatment method mentioned in forums regarding treatment of depression. But according to clinical studies, when compared, patients diagnosed with depression that were resistant to antidepressants were also shown to be resistant to psychotherapy. This references a specific type of depression that is referred to as ‘treatment-resistant depression’ (Parker, Graham, and Sheppard 1). Treatment-resistant depression is something that still baffles those in the medical field and is synonymous with chronic depression. But although psychotherapy and antidepressant are somewhat similar, they still differ in certain aspects of …show more content…

One genre of music therapy is improvisational music therapy, which is defined as a method that employs improvising as a primary therapeutic experience (Albornoz 209). Specifically music therapy is, the process of inventing music while playing or singing, using whatever sound sources are available in a given therapeutic situation to obtain an art product. It sounds like a therapeutic method of essentially not planning anything and just going to a session with a patient and just making things and hoping for the best, but the results have proven otherwise. Improvisational music therapy has been proven to work on patients diagnosed with depression and who struggle with substance abuse. A study was conducted that showed that when improvisational music therapy was used on patients diagnosed with depression who were also struggling with substance abuse and showed a significant decrease in depression rates when compared to their own personal rates recorded before implementing the therapy. Overall, it lead to patients to feel more relaxed in regards to ‘substance urge’ and ‘symptoms of depression’, and also helped them gain greater sense and motivation to explore who they were as individuals. This provides almost double the benefits for the patient because this one method of treatment treats two negative aspects of their

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