Your regular family doctor—with an M.D.— can also prescribe antidepressant medication: in fact, the practice is quite common. Many psychiatrists (and other mental health experts) worry that nonspecialists are acting without the right background, information, diagnosis or follow-up. Landau worries about the fact that some nonpsychiatrists fail to make a proper diagnosis of depressed patients and give antianxiety drugs instead of antidepressants. Antianxiety drugs can behave like alcohol in the bodies of depressed patients, she says, adding an addiction on top of the depression! There is sometimes an anxiety component to depression, Landau adds, but certainly giving only antianxiety drugs to depressed patients is the wrong approach.
There are several categories of antidepressant drugs, ranging from the old-line tricyclic antidepressants, to the MAO inhibitors, to the newest so-called seratonin re-uptake inhibitors (like Prozac), which have received enormous amounts of media attention of late and are already among the most-prescribed medications.
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