When antidepressants fail

[Healthline, November 11, 2019] At 43 years old, Sara has been dealing with depression for two decades. Over the years, she told Healthline she’s been prescribed many different medications. None of them have ever worked for her.

“It’s been a roller coaster of medication adjustments and medication changes and medication combinations and medication attempts. It’s been a very long, hard road with medications,” she said.

A few years ago, she was finally diagnosed with treatment resistant depression (TRD), a condition that impacts as many as one-third of adults dealing with a major depressive disorder.

TRD is “quite common,” according to Dr. Mary Beth Lardizabal, DO, medical director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Allina Health.

“Twenty to thirty percent of people don’t respond to their first medication trial, and then you have the second and possibly a third. And there are some people [for whom] the antidepressant effect starts to lose effect over time.”