Just curious. If you take a depressant and an antidepressant around the same time, do they in any way cancel each other out? Does anything unusual happen?
Language fail.
“Depressants” do not depress mood, they depress the central nervous system. They make you stupid and sleepy. They do not make you sad.
In pharmacological terminology, the antonym of depressant is stimulant, not antidepressant.
And no, mixing them doesn’t cause them to cancel each other out. They may amplify each other, or one may amplify the other or they may cause waves of alternating effects. This is what is observed when people mix cocaine and an opiate.
I’ve heard (anecdotally) that mixing alcohol with antidepressants will render the AD ineffective, or something like that.
Four Loko
Bingo.
You get the premise for a really hacky comedian’s joke.
My GP told me that antidepressants’ effects are mitigated by regular alcohol consumption, especially to excess on occasion. But, I take Xanax as needed (on a stressful day, 6 mg qd, on a regular day [most], none). Haven’t noticed anything personally, but I’m on a low dose of Citalopram (20 mg qd), which is taken for anxiety, so (a) I’m not perhaps the ideal subject, never having had major depression and (b) I don’t know of any studies, nor would I know how to interpret them if there were any.
I am actually taking a “speedball” under a doctors care. I take morphine for pain and amphetamine to stave off the lethargic effects of the morphine. However, my doses must be way south of those needed to experience a high effect. In my case the anti-depressant (stimulant) wins!
I think this is what powers the USS Enterprise.
Mostly, one continues to feel depressed. Sometimes even worse than before.
Wrong.
That’s a depressant and a stimulant.
You have done something to your brain. You have made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, it will do something else to your brain. You will make it low. Why trust one drug and not the other? That’s politics, innit?
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I recommend you smoke some more grass.
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If you’re hanging onto a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision - let go before it’s too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope?
[/Withnail & I]
However, the opposite of clinical depression is mania or hypomania, and there are anti-manic drugs, mood stabilizers. Lithium being the most common.
Some people with Bipolar disorders are prescribed both a mood stabilizer and an anti-depressant, to smooth both lows and highs out. Which one wins depends entirely on dosage and is very carefully monitored.
Bipolar here. Correct–although I believe Lithium is being phased out for medicine with fewer problems (close blood level monitoring and a slight flattening of emotions being the most common).
I’ve talked to people who’ve said that it would be great to take my anti-depressants–these “happy pills”–and then have their day brightened and happy.
It don’t work that way.
It makes you more mellow. Of course, moderation in all things.
As an undergrad I did a research project with some biochemists and a psychiatrist who were working on lithium as a mood stabilizer for bipolar people. They were finding that it was effective, but it was not yet in very wide use. They told me that part of the problem was that it was difficult to get the drug companies interested because the stuff was so cheap (probably unpatentable too) that there would be very little profit in it for them.
Despite this, lithium did soon take off as a widely used drug for bipolar disorder.
It sounds as though, now, the drug companies have finally found a way around their little “problem” with it.
The side effects of Lithium, the fact that the effective dosage is very close to the toxic dosage and the need for blood level monitoring are all damn good reasons to develop better treatments. I’ll let the evil drug companies off for that one.
Have you read the ingredients list?
Neither have I, but I’m sure there’s some Prozac, Ambian, and Quaaludes in there.