Are Anxiety and Depression Medication a Healthy Long-Term Solution?

I had a conversation recently with someone I know very well. She shared that her new therapist suggested medication as a tool for the anxiety she is experiencing in her current situation.

Medication and the medical professionals who create and manage it have saved lives in all different illness and diseases, I have no doubt about that. Medication geared toward mental health diagnoses can be an extremely useful tool when working through a particularly difficult time period in life - it can give us the energy/motivation, wherewithal and capacity to learn the necessary tools for managing oneself.

I do become concerned when the tools aren’t taught, however. So many of us live day in and day out struggling to manage our emotional and mental health states, and my perception tells me that a bandaid called medicine is sometimes used as a long term management tool rather than a right now solution along with the teaching of skills.

The goal, in my opinion, EVEN if it is never reached (with the assumption that it will and can be), is to strive toward supporting while also teaching emotional regulation and management tools so that people can be equipped to run their own lives rather than be managed long term.

There are plenty of strategies available to clients and patients to learn skills to manage their mental health, and if we rely on medication, we beg the question, “can we control ourselves, or is this unachievable?”

How will we ever trust ourselves? How will we ever experience successful relationships when we surrender to the notion that we are simply out of control and we may never get a handle on ourselves?

When I work with clients, I am interested in forward thinking amongst the massive amounts of support I provide. A “you can do this” attitude is necessary to get people in and then OUT of my office, rather than focusing on keeping them with me. I have many people to help in my lifetime and my goal is to equip you with the tools you may never have learned so that you can utilize them, find success and then model them to those around you, quite possibly your current or future children - and then they either won’t be sitting in my office in the future, OR they’ll be in and out quicker than you were.