One reason many people with mental illness have trouble staying on medication is that it doesn’t always work right away, it takes a while to see an effect, so it’s discouraging. Fun fact: Anti-depressants work chemically fairly quickly, in a day or two, but we don’t start to see a clinical effect until weeks have passed, this may imply that their selective inhibition of serotonin uptake may not be the reason that they work to treat depression, at least not directly. The brain is weird.
Medication for mental health is not an exact science, different people react differently to the medications and any one of them will help a percentage of people but have no effect on or hinder other people. Sometimes medications just will not work properly on a person’s mental state. Of course, medication still has a place in medicine and should be tried as a supplement to therapy. I just wish therapy was something offered right away instead of a last resort added as an after thought in Canada’s medical system.
Isn’t the reason selective inhibition of serotonin uptake don’t start working immediately simply the fact you need to produce some serotonin which uptake will be inhibited first?