Opinion: Don’t cast aside an effective antidepressant just because it’s old
To fight a three-year depression, I was prescribed 10 different antidepressants and underwent shock therapy. It took an old drug, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, to bring me back.
One morning in the fall of 2010, my husband got out of bed and crashed to the floor, unconscious. As Eddie came to, he complained of a painful pressure in his chest. In the hospital, his condition worsened. Every test confirmed what I as a nurse already knew, that his heart was shutting down. A day later he died.
As I mourned Eddie’s death, I worried that it would plunge me deeper into an episode of depression that had begun earlier that spring after a succession of harrowing family crises.
My mother had sporadically suffered from debilitating depression, and the Black Dog hounded me as well. As a longtime health care provider, I had developed a toolbox of remedies to manage my symptoms and turn around my dark moods. I took Wellbutrin,
