In this video I'm going to talk about the emotional blunting that you can get
when you take antidepressants I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist and this
channel is about mental health education and self-improvement. I post videos every
Wednesday so if you don't want to miss one click Subscribe. If you've ever taken
an antidepressant such as zoloft or lexapro you may have noticed that after
a while of taking it you feel emotionally numb or dulled. It's as if
you you can't experience normal emotions or as if someone's holding you back. Some
people will even say that they feel like they just don't care about things
anymore and they question whether they're
getting depressed again. This problem is pretty common and it's thought to occur
in anywhere between 30 to 50 percent of people taking serotonin
enhancing antidepressants and yes that's a lot of people. The antidepressants that
we use fall into two main categories the ones that enhance serotonin and those
that do not. The main brain chemicals involved in mood are serotonin
norepinephrine and dopamine and most of the antidepressants increase serotonin
levels in your brain. Two of them enhance or increase serotonin and norepinephrine
and only one of them increases norepinephrine and dopamine and doesn't
touch serotonin and that would be wellbutrin. There's still some debate as
to why exactly the emotional blunting happens but here's one of the main
working theories. When you get increased serotonin from the medications, the extra
serotonin through a feedback loop decreases dopamine secretion. This
decreased dopamine causes blunting and apathy. It's almost like an overshoot of
having too much serotonin around and it dampens down your dopamine. So what can
be done about this? Well first of all this would be changes that your doctor
would make to your medication regimen it's not something you would do on your
own, but this is just for your education. If you have
done pretty well on the antidepressants for a while but for this one problem,
sometimes lowering the dose can resolve the problem. sometimes adding wellbutrin
to your regimen can help because it increases dopamine. And of course this is
only if the wellbutrin is compatible with the other medication that you're
taking. Sometimes it's not and your doctor can check those drug-drug
interactions. If you don't have much anxiety, taking wellbutrin alone may fix
the problem and this is because anxiety normally responds to the serotonin
enhancing antidepressants. In fact, serotonin medications are what we use to
treat daily anxiety. So they're actually antidepressants and
anti-anxiety drugs. Wellbutrin on the other hand also called
buproprion, that's the generic name. It's a great antidepressant, but it doesn't do
well for an anxious depression. If you do have a lot of anxiety and/or you've
tried wellbutrin before and you can't take it for some reason, you can try a
different serotonin enhancing antidepressant. Just because you got the
dulling effect with one medication doesn't mean that it will automatically
happen with the rest. And there's lots of options including the serotonin
norepinephrine drugs like Cymbalta or the serotonin receptor drugs we call
them such as Remeron or Trintellix. So that's it for today. Just a quick note
about that dulling effect and to give you some information about why it
happens and how you can improve it or resolve it. I see a lot of - its really
unfortunate I see a lot of people who'll do well on their antidepressant for a
while and then all of a sudden it just kind of goes real dull and unfortunately
the people who are who tend to be the most creative
in my experience tend to be the most sensitive to this problem. They noticed a
dulling of their creativity and if that's the kind of work that you do for
a living, then that's just not going to work at all. So sometimes you may have to
switch in and out of medications or and try different add-ons and things
like that to see if you can get something that still leaves you feeling
sharp and functioning well and while at the same time treating your depression.
Let me know in the comments if this has happened to you and what fixed it. Dow
did you get around it? What made it better? That's of course if you're so
inclined to give that kind of information in a comment. Take care.