Do antidepressants help stop obsessing over the past?

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I've been feeling down for quite a while now and I've been going to a psychologist (so that means no prescriptions) to try and sort things out. Very little progress has been made.

I consciously know that I need to move on with my life and put myself out there and try new things, but I can't seem to stop thinking about how unhappy I am and how I got here. It's a drain on my mental energy and I end up "needing" to rest or just sit around doing nothing. All of my hobbies feel like chores, I can't really remember the last time I felt real enthusiasm about anything I did - I had to fake it quite a few times. I used to think that was a part of growing up but now I'm not so sure.

It probably doesn't help that I don't have the kind of friends that hang out regularly, or the kind that tries to drag you out of the house once in a while.

Does this sound like something antidepressants can treat? I don't contemplate suicide (because I think it's fruitless if you're not in physical pain and just ends up hurting the people around me). I don't expect antidepressants by themselves to make me new friends but I'm hopeful it'll make things easier.

Is it possible to start medication and quit once I "get the ball rolling"? The ball being a higher self-esteem and palpable progress in new activities.

I'm not sure, I'm not a medical person. All I know is that anti depressants aren't so easy to just stop taking once you have started. But that's only my experience.

The effect of antidepressants is likely to vary somewhat between the different ingredients and between people. Those I took helped by stopping me obsessing. One of the problems with depression is that your mind gets stuck in a rut and the same negative thoughts keep going around and around. The antidepressants helped to break that cycle by interrupting my thought processes. The downside was that they also made it difficult to maintain concentration on anything, gave me chronic drowsiness throughout the day and gave me extremely vivid and wild dreams while sleeping.

So, they *may* help you to stop obsessing over the past if they help to break obsessive negative thoughts. Ideally you need to combine the depressants with a change of lifestyle too or to change whatever it is that is making you depressed in the first place but stopping obsessive thinking is generally a step in the right direction.

You do have to taper down on many of them, yes. It can take up to a month if you have been on them for a year or more. But it is doable. It's not the sort of really nasty addiction you would get with benzos or antipsychotics.

Antidepressants may be worth a try if your psychiatrist thinks they might help. You do have some depressive symptoms ("losing interest in hobbies you once enjoyed" is a big red flag for me).

They're not going to magically make you feel better. They take a while to kick in. What they will probably do for you is give you sort of an edge--make it a little easier to get yourself out of the house, a little easier to do useful things, a little easier to take advantage of therapy. You're still going to have to work for it; there's no getting around that. both depression and anxiety disorders involve a lot of learned behaviors that you have to unlearn. Still--it can help.

I'm not a doctor, but I think antidepressants may indeed help someone in your position. I say that because you said that you recognize that there is something stopping you from letting go of old baggage, and that's the most important part thing anyone can recognize and understand, and it's the first step toward helping yourself even before any drug can help. I would suggest getting to see an MD psychiatrist (or even a regular doctor will sometimes prescribe antidepressants for patients), and try several of them out. The main thing to remember is that some will work fine for one person, and not work for the next. There are many names, and most of the ones used today are SSRI type (Prozac, Wellbutrin, etc) . Also extremely important is to give each drug the time it needs to begin to work. I believe that is typically a month or more, and many, MANY people stop using the drug too soon because they don't feel any better yet, and that's a sad mistake.

Charles