Q: Dear Frank, What medication do you find to be the most helpful for PTSD that includes depression and anxiety? What about Hypervigilance?
A: Dear reader, The medical answer is an SSRI. (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). It helps depression and anxiety and it does not need ever-increasing dosage to be effective. But it takes a month to work and it needs to be used long-term. Short acting drugs do better for quick relief of PTSD anxiety. Currently the antihypertensives like CLONIDINE -an alpha blocker – are preferred.
The benzodiazapines, like KLONOPIN are not recommended. But I will use Klonopin and Ativan and Valium when the patient has tolerated them well and can be trusted to use them properly.
Regarding the choice of SSRI (or SNRI – Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) – that often takes trial and error. A good doctor makes an informed guess based on family history and previous use of meds and consideration of side effects. I often start with Lexapro.
Frank<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Q: Dear Frank, What medication do you find to be the most helpful for PTSD that includes depression and anxiety? What about Hypervigilance? A: Dear reader, The medical answer is an SSRI. (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). It helps depression and anxiety and it does not need ever-increasing dosage to be effective. But it takes a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":8,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4964"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4964"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6859,"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4964\/revisions\/6859"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.giftfromwithin.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}