Many people suffering from depression are often shocked when they visit the psychiatry department, and they are often very confused when doctors convince them that they need to take antidepressant medication for at least six months or even years. Except for a few serious illnesses and chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease, people seem to have a natural optimistic expectation of taking medication for a few days. Because of this, people often disobey medical advice and stop taking medication on their own. Why should these psychotropic drugs be taken for years and years? Can’t you take them for a few days less? There is a Chinese proverb – “Three feet of ice is not a day’s cold”, which is aptly used for depression and other mental illnesses, that is, depression is not formed overnight, but often has a very long-standing psychological foundation. Once depression is formed, it is not easy to melt these painful diseases overnight, especially to eliminate the psychological basis of the disease that has been accumulated for many years, which is why people often say that depression and these diseases seem to be difficult to “get rid of the root”, because the symptoms of the disease are easy to control, but eliminating the psychological basis of the symptoms is not easy. It is not easy to eliminate the psychological basis of the symptoms of the disease, and if the basis is not eliminated, once the conditions are ripe, it is naturally “easy to relapse” and “cannot be eradicated”, especially when there is no other method but medication, in order to get enough efficacy of depression and less relapse, medication In order to achieve sufficient efficacy and less relapse of depression, medication naturally needs a long enough period of time to stabilize the efficacy. To put it another way, it may be easier to understand. If we cut the skin of a hand or foot, we usually need to dress the wound and use some anti-inflammatory and antibacterial medication if necessary, and after three or five days the wound heals quickly, the gauze is removed and the medication is discontinued, at which point we would say our wound is completely healed. We may think of depression as these wounds, but the difference is that the location of these wounds is in the brain (this should be considered an “internal wound”). Wounds naturally need to be “bandaged” and “protected”, so we might think of antidepressant medication as gauze and anti-inflammatory medication to bandage the wounds. We all know that the skin mucous membrane and many internal organs of the human body have a strong ability to regenerate and recover, so a few days after the cut skin will re-grow the wound, but the human brain is not so strong, the number of nerve cells in the brain will not increase after adulthood, once the damage or death is difficult to regenerate, so the human brain is the most delicate organ in the human body, from those who had a stroke The recovery process of those who had a stroke should not be difficult for us to find this point. Thus, when the brain is injured, the brain’s self-recovery becomes a big problem, or the “internal injury” to be fully repaired, the time will be very long, often calculated in months or even years. Medications and acute treatment can often temporarily restore some brain functions more quickly, for example, many people feel much better after three weeks of medication and immediately want to go back to work, just as we can do something after a skin cut is bandaged up, but is the wound completely healed by then? No. If the medication is stopped or the gauze is withdrawn, I think most people can foresee that without the protection of gauze, a little contamination or irritation, the wound that has not yet scabbed over will rupture again or suffer from infection, and similarly, the “internal wound” in the brain that has not yet fully “scabbed over” and healed “Without the help of drugs in the encounter with minor stimulation or stress or even no stimulation will again show obvious symptoms, as if the disease “relapse”, in fact, the disease has not been completely healed. So when is it time to stop taking the medication? In other words, when can the “gauze” be pulled off the wound and no longer need to dress it? Naturally, when the “wound” scab has healed or the “wound” is repaired to the point where it can withstand normal environmental stimuli and pressure, then remove the gauze and it will not be so easy to get infected, this process is five days and seven days for the skin or at most ten days and a half months, for the brain is months to a year. For the brain, it takes months to a year or even years. So, if you ask how long to take medication for depression, an experienced psychiatrist will usually tell you to take it for at least six months or even longer. Of course, the duration of medication is also related to many other conditions, for example, the longer the duration of the disease, the longer the duration of medication, which is not difficult to understand, just like a wound on the skin, the longer it does not heal, the longer it takes to recover and to be protected. There is a common saying “how long is the horizontal, how high is the vertical”, we might as well use this as a metaphor for the time limit of depression medication, early recognition and detection of depression, early standardized and systematic treatment to make depression “horizontal” not too long, then our depression’s The treatment time will not be too long, and the treatment effect will be more optimistic. Of course, medication alone is not enough, there are also ways to accelerate and strengthen the brain to restore health, please pay attention to the next issue of Healthy Heart Life. Note: The American Psychiatric Association’s APA 2010 Practical Guidelines for the Treatment of Depression recommends a 6-12 week acute treatment period and a 4-9 month consolidation period for depression, and recommends a combination of medication and psychotherapy.