As people’s awareness of mental health increases, the identification of depression is gradually being taken seriously. However, patients and their families have always had doubts about the treatment of depression, believing that “this disease cannot go to the root, as long as a little better on the line, there is no need to treat so long”. In fact, this is not the case. The goals of depression treatment are: (1) to increase the efficiency and clinical cure rate of depressive disorders, and to minimize the disability and suicide rates. The key to successful treatment is to completely eliminate clinical symptoms and reduce the risk of relapse. Long-term follow-up found a relapse rate of 13% in patients with complete symptom remission and 34% in patients with partial remission. (2) Improving the quality of survival, restoring social function, and achieving a true sense of cure, not just the disappearance of symptoms. (3) Prevention of relapse. Treatment strategies of antidepressants: (1) Acute treatment: control symptoms and try to achieve clinical cure. When treating severe depression, medication usually starts to take effect in 2~4 weeks. (2) Consolidation treatment: at least 4-6 months, during which the patient is unstable and at high risk of rekindling. (3) Maintenance treatment: Depression is a highly recurrent disease, so maintenance treatment is needed to prevent relapse. At the end of maintenance treatment, the condition is stable and can be slowly reduced until the termination of treatment, but early signs of relapse should be closely monitored, and once early signs of relapse are detected, the original treatment should be rapidly resumed. Most of the opinions about the duration of maintenance treatment are different, most of them think that the maintenance treatment for the first depressive episode is 6~8 months; those who have more than two relapses, especially those who have two relapses in the last 5 years should be maintained, and the general tendency is at least 2~3 years. Two or more episodes should be treated for a long time. Therefore, the treatment of depression is a relatively long process, and medication needs to be “adequate and full course”. Patients and family members must be patient and cooperate with the treatment in order to improve the quality of life and minimize the risk of relapse.