Take Antidepressants? You May Be Staving Off Dementia

When you take an SSRI or mood stabilizer, you encounter plenty of people who say they, too, think they could benefit from something like that but they never would because we don't yet know what the end results could be. What if, in old age, they ended up growing a third arm because of their decades of Prozac? (Okay, no one's ever said that to me, but there are so many ignorant people running around telling those who take such medications they are not sober that I wouldn't put it past them. Ahem. Different topic.) Point being: As someone who's taken various medications of this ilk over the years, I've wrestled with the notion of being part of the experimental generation. Because there's no way around the fact that we are the people these meds are being tested on. Ultimately, what I've concluded is that if these medications help me feel better today, I'll take what comes later. But it was with great gratification that I read about a new study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research that showed the antidepressant Lexapro might actually provide protection against dementia. Memory Helper? Come Again? While I'd never heard that antidepressants hurt your memory, I am someone who, if she has trouble recalling the name of a restaurant she went to a month ago, convinces herself she has no memory at all and life's all downhill from here. This happens in about a fraction of a second. I'm that girl who, in the midst of one of those fractions of a second, signed up for Lumosity...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news