Do you need TO be on anxiety MEDICATION?
“Do you think I need to be on meds?” is a pretty common question, particularly in an anxiety clinic like Kentuckiana Treatment Center for Anxiety & OCD. The answer is … Well, maybe. Researchers have been looking at this question for almost 30 years now. And the most consistent findings show that two categories or classifications of medications are effective for the reduction of anxiety or OCD-symptoms: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Benzodiazepines. And they’re commonly used because they work.
But, that doesn’t mean that everybody who takes meds for anxiety or OCD needs to in order to get better. Again, the question that’s commonly asked is not, Do meds work? It’s, Do you think I need to be on them to get better? And the most consistent findings are that while meds work, a majority of patients with clinical anxiety and/or OCD are able to make real progress and maintain symptom-reduction over time without the use of meds.
The answer is: if you have worked with an anxiety- or OCD-treatment specialist and engaged a course of one of the exposure therapy-protocols, and either 1. have not made measurable progress over the course of approximately 16 sessions, or 2. continue to experience persistent relapses in symptoms, then you would probably benefit from medication.
This, of course, raises the question, How do people make progress without meds? The answer is evidence-based psychotherapy.
But for a lot if us, when we think of “psychotherapy,” we think of talking endlessly about our feelings and trying to uncover how, and specifically why, our past experiences still bother us today. And there’s a place for that. But this can be time-consuming and expensive — not mention (when it comes to the treatment anxiety and OCD), ineffective. That’s why we don’t do talk therapy at Kentuckiana Treatment Center for Anxiety & OCD. We do evidence-based psychotherapy. The process is rooted in results, and based on the evidence of the outcome-data.
Many anxious patients don’t need meds to make progress; because the structured and tested process of evidence-based psychotherapy helps produce the results that they want … without medication.