Antidepressant effects

@CharcoalandMax I am not an expert, but I googled Abilify (aripiprazole) and I found some relevant research. It's complicated.

What I've read indicates that Abilify is essentially an antipsychotic, not an antidepressant. It is sometimes prescribed for people who have unipolar depression (major depressive disorder), but that's completely different from depressive episodes in bipolar disorder. Abilify seems to be good for controlling manic episodes, but not much use for depressive episodes. Actual antidepressants are not commonly used for bipolar depression in case they make the manic episodes worse, but there's a class of medications called mood stabilizers that can be used together with antipsychotics like Abilify. ADHD possibly makes everything much more complicated, and I didn't even try to research that.

To answer your question about when Abilify starts working, people I know (in real life, not at 7 Cups) who have been prescribed similar antidepressants have mostly told me that they start to work pretty quickly, but getting the dose and the timing right can take weeks. If you started it a few days ago, I would expect it to be having some effect already (but I am not an expert, remember).

So really, I feel this needs to be a discussion between you and whoever prescribed the Abilify.

Charlie

So I haven’t taken that specific medication. I feel like I’ve tried a few different ones. But never was really taking them constantly. Which in terms was definitely my own fault. But one of them specifically made me have a sever panic attack in public. Which ultimately I think scared me away from them. I wasn’t feeling myself from it and I got scared of that feeling and it caused me to panic and had a full blown meltdown in public which never really happened before. Since then I haven’t really been in medicine. And I know I need something but scared to go back to the dr. So I hope that this medicine does you well just be aware of your true self and it seems in my case my dr was willing to change medications very frequently. But I’ve also heard that it could take multiple weeks/months to really see a change. Mental health is a long process. It’s not like a cold where u take some cold medicine and get better in a week.