Most depressed people suffer bouts of despair that can last several weeks or even months.
But for some, the gloom goes on for so long that it becomes frighteningly ordinary. And at that point, says Dr. Martin Keller of the Brown University School of Medicine, treatment for the depression seems impossible. They see it as a character disorder, and they don't think that medication would be helpful. But the opposite is true, as Keller and several other experts found in a large national study of chronic major depression. Their findings, which appear in the Nov. 18 Journal of the American Medical Association , indicate that a popular antidepressant drug can hold even the darkest of depressions at bay.