Just two decades following the ‘happy drug’ Prozac being launched, scores of young women cannot envisage a life without antidepressant medications. Shocking estimates of above 2 million individuals are consuming antidepressants for at least 5 years and the biggest set are women in the age groups from eighteen to forty-five years.

A new-fangled study carried out in the University of Southampton has discovered that at least fifteen percent females that are below forty-five years old – about a million females are given antidepressant prescriptions annually, and a sizeable number of them are continuing to have them even past their suggested time frame.

A number of experts have cautioned of disconcerting comparables to several thousand women that got habituated to the extensively recommended tranquillising medicines inclusive of Vallium.

The parameters outlined by National Institute for Clinical Excellence or NICE indicate that antidepressant medicines are intended to be consumed for 9 months in case of the foremost depressive episode and not beyond two years in case of those who are feeling additional depression.

However, several young women continue to pick up prescriptions repeatedly for several months and even years, actually with no medical confirmations – a number of these women wish to halt it, but fail.

Yet physicians continue to regularly give reassurances to their patients that the side effects arising from antidepressant intake are principally mild-ranging and brief and comprise of feeling drowsy, dizzy and putting on weight which becomes perceivable in the initial couple of weeks and could generally be reverted by taking another form of pill.

However there has been surmounting proof of protracted use being associated with grave health issues inclusive of abdominal bleeding, lesser amounts of sodium in the older aged people that could cause falls and heightened chances of stroke.

Lately, claims of certain antidepressants raising the chances of rare birth anomalies have surfaced. There are also continuous debates on the efficacy quotient of antidepressants.

Womankind is by far more susceptible to depression (1 in 4 suffering from it during some stage in life as compared to 1 in 10 males. Women have to bear the constant strain of being answerable for their kids, older relatives along with professional pressures whilst additionally ailing from hormonal vacillations.

There is a giddy assortment of antidepressant drugs obtainable like the early tricyclic medicines, the widely advised Prozac –manner selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors which all function in diverse means to raise serotonin (feel-good) brain chemicals.

Though antidepressants are non-addictive, however a wide number of those consuming them are not able to give them up due to the chronic and unlikeable withdrawal signs arising like anxiousness, discomforting sensation, palpitations and memory slips that arise when trying to halt their intake.

The knowledge on the right means to taper withdrawal is not widely available. One way to taper withdrawal signs is to use a liquid dosage of the drug that could be eventually lowered with far more ease as compared to tablets.

According to NICE parameters, the optimal depression treatment is the merger of medicines and psychological or talk therapies. Though the long-standing risks of antidepressant medicines seem to overshadow the pros, several experts are favouring psychological therapies, though these are often in dearth.