See Inside
Existing antidepressants leave a lot to be desired. They can take weeks to start working, and they fail many people. Researchers are scouting for better options
?| March 7, 2012?|
Image: Tom Schierlitz/Trunk Archive
In Brief
- Current antidepressants can take weeks to ease depression. In certain people, they do not work at all, and if they do work now, they may stop tomorrow.
- Faster-acting agents and those with new mechanisms of action are needed, yet Big Pharma?s pipeline of such drugs is limited.
- Government and university laboratories and some small pharmaceutical companies are trying to fill in the gap and have some promising leads.
A young woman who calls herself blue?berryoctopus had been taking anti?depressants for three years, mostly for anxiety and panic attacks, when she recounted her struggles with them on the Web site Experience Project. She said she had spent a year on Paxil, one of the popular SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but finally stopped because it destroyed her sex drive. She switched to Xanax, an ?antianxiety drug, which brought back her libido but at the cost of renewed symptoms. Then Paxil again, then Lexapro (another SSRI), then Pristiq, a member of a related class of antidepressants, the SNRIs (serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors). At the time of the post, she was on yet another SSRI, Zoloft, plus Wellbutrin (a cousin of SNRIs that affects the activity of dopamine as well as norepinephrine), which was intended to counteract the sexual side effects of Zoloft. ?I don?t notice much of a difference with the Wellbutrin, but I?m on the lowest dose now,? she wrote. ?I?m going back to my psychiatrist next week, so maybe he?ll up it. Who knows.?
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