1) It’s important to know what you’re taking the medication for. This might seem like an obvious point, but I see patients all the time who are taking anti-depressants and don’t know why they’re taking them. What are you targeting with the medication? Anti-depressants can be described for different things: depression, anxiety, pain management, obsessiveness, vertigo. It’s a good first step to narrow it down to one of these categories, but it’s possible to be even more precise. Depression, for example presents with different symptoms in different people. For one person, depression may present with irritability, feelings of sadness and loss of interest in usually pleasurable activities. In another person, depression may present as loss of appetite and sleepiness. If you don’t know why you’re taking the medication, it will be impossible to know if the medication is doing what it was intended to do.
