The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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If you're talking about pills you can pop? No. Probably not. Which I'm happy about, because it means my textbooks don't change regularly; and which I'm sad about because, well, I've been depressed. The worst part is that the workload and my upcoming exam is threatening to send me into a relapse.
The good news is that IV or nasal ketamine is much better established in terms of safety and efficacy now. There's rTMS, which isn't as effective as ECT but is a solid option.
Antidepressants do not meaningfully increase the risk of suicide for those 25+, the profile is best described as mixed but in a positive direction. For children and adolescents, there's enough elevation to warrants extra caution and more monitoring. In the UK, we'd follow up an adult on a new antidepressant 2 weeks after initiation, those younger a week or so earlier. This is usually explained as the drugs sometimes giving you the energy to act on existing suicidal thoughts before they reduce the suicidal ideation or impulse. In other words they're fixing you, but in the wrong order. In the elderly, the evidence is even more robustly in favor of a net improvement on all fronts.
Current best practice for adults here is to monitor a followup review 2 weeks after starting someone on one, to check this hasn't happened.
There's Auvelity, which is two old drugs in a new trench coat. But if you want something novel, the last one was probably vortioexetine, agomelatine or zuranolone, depending on how annoying or pedantic you went to get about things.
And of course, the emerging evidence for psychedelic therapy.
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