Why You May Want To Stay On Your Antidepressant
Channel: BioBalance Healthcast
Date: 2017-11-05

Read more at www.biobalancehealth.com

An article in Aeon recently called The Kindled Brain, caused me to rethink my theory that once my patients received testosterone for 4-6 months and their mood disorder such as Depression, Bipolar Disorder or PTSD had abated, that they should be able to approach their psychiatrist and decrease their dose of antidepressants or even get off of them. This article suggests that there is actual acceleration of the severity and the frequency of episodes of these mood disorders with each new episode, which is assumed to be because a patient goes off and on his or her medication.
They call it The Kindling Effect meaning that the more episodes of say depression a person has, the higher the stress hormone Cortisol, which causes damage to an area of the brain called the Hippocampus which seems to form a “path” of abnormal connections, causing the path to get deeper and more fixed with each new episode.  If a person goes off his or her medicine after an episode then the number of episodes, therefore the more damage, they will sustain. I would have called it Priming the Pump but I’m not the researcher!

Depression medicine