What are rapid-acting antidepressants? Increasingly in demand

Depression

From your own experience, you may be aware of some depression medications that are known to combat the disorder. However, do you know what it is fast acting antidepressants and how are they different from these? As the name suggests, these medications are different in that they work much faster. But how do they do it?

Fast acting antidepressants

Depression, the epidemic of this century

In principle, in the case of depression that has already been diagnosed by a health professional, action should be taken immediately. A patient with depression has up to 21 times greater risk of your life being threatened than someone who doesn’t suffer from it. That’s why there are quick-acting antidepressants for the most severe cases of depression.

Designed to solve this problem, or at least control it without wasting time, these antidepressants represent a direct evolution created in the 50s and 60s. They had some disadvantages, such as a delay in detecting their effects. Add to this some negative effects and the inability to provide them to older people or people with cardiovascular diseases, the need to create other types of antidepressants became obvious. This is how fast-acting ones appeared, which are very common today.

Members of organizations such as the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health (SEPSM) explain that the first antidepressants showed improvement after two to three weeks. Too much for those people who are a little more serious.

Features of modern antidepressants

Although these drugs share some common advantages, the fast-acting drugs stand out for their exclusive benefits. In the last decades of the last century, faster-acting, safer and more tolerable antidepressants already appeared on the market.

And although they are not much more effective than the first predecessors of antidepressants, they are useful for treatment. “fragile” population groups.

Previously, if you suffered from cardiovascular diseases or other congenital or acquired pathologies, the prescription of antidepressants was excluded. Of course, this meant that if any illness occurred, the patient would have to live with depression without the help of medication.

For many years quality of life of these people was bad. Although there are other tools to relieve depression, tools are generally important for short-term recovery. In most of these cases, the normal thing was that the disease gradually worsened until it became paralyzed. Hence the progress that new generation antidepressants represent.

What are antidepressants?

According to Medline Plus, these are drugs that are prescribed to treat depression, a serious and very common illness that affects mood and mental health in general. can make you feel tired, hopeless, worried or scared. It can change the way you think, sleep, and eat. Depression can make some people consider taking their own life. Therefore, such drugs are another hope for treatment to reduce or mitigate this problem.

How do fast-acting antidepressants work?

This medical scientific progress would not have been possible without the discovery of antidepressant properties ketamine anesthetic. We are talking about an antidepressant that is sold in many parts of the world, including Spain. The interesting thing is that we are talking about a mechanism of action that is unique in its class. It is the first NMDA receptor antagonist in the brain to be studied. Recent reports claim that it works as early as the second dose, not curing the patient but improving their quality of life.

Ketamine may be especially helpful for people with severe depression and suicidal thoughts, for whom waiting several weeks to see results is risky. In past, If the danger was great, the person was hospitalized in a center where these thoughts were contained and could be prevented. Today there is no need to isolate him from his family because all he has to do is give him fast-acting antidepressants to make him feel better and these terrible thoughts will disappear.

What other alternative is there?

If you don’t trust quick-acting antidepressants or they don’t work as well as they should, there are other alternative treatments. In some cases, both electroconvulsive therapy and electroconvulsive therapy should be considered an effective treatment option. But many of these people are saved from invasive treatment (with general anesthesia) by using ketamine.

Do you have any contraindications?

Esketamine, a ketamine derivative available as a nasal spray or injection, is intended only for patients in whom traditional antidepressants have clearly failed. In addition to intranasal administration or injection, we must closely monitor the patient’s response for several weeks after its administration. This is to keep a close eye on your blood pressure.

Looking to the future upcoming fast-acting antidepressants They will have to be easier to manage.

Scientists are confident that they no longer cause changes in consciousness and any patient can access them without restrictions.