How effective are antidepressants?

Anti depressants : Anti depressants do their thing modulating the neuro chemicals within the brain. You must do your thing to deal with the cause of your depression otherwise they will never achieve their function. Hope this helps.

Very broad question: Antidepressants can be very helpful at managing symptoms of depression. Different people respond better to different ones. Sometimes for best effect, they need augmenting with other agents. Still, they will not make you "happy." the psychotherapeutic work required to heal from depression must be done by you -- usually with a skilled psychologist or other psychotherapist.

Great stuff: If we could cure heart disease as well as we can manage or treat depression with antidepressants combined with psychotherapy, we'd truly have made major progress. Depression is very treatable, and the risks of not treating can be loss of job, marital or relationship difficulties, alcohol abuse, suicide, and een serious healt problems. There is lots of help for depression.

They can be: very effective. However, bipolar depression may require different medications than antidepressants. One drug does not fit all. Thus, sometimes a person may need a trial of more than one medication to get the best result.