Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
Wanting it to stop right now is not a character flaw, it is what anxiety does to a person. Saying the hurry out loud, instead of acting on it quietly, keeps it from making the decisions.
That urgency is the reason people creep a dose up, hop between supplements, and abandon anything slow before it has had a chance. Treating the hurry as part of what needs care, rather than arguing product by product, tends to go further. It also lets someone say what they actually want from treatment, which is often relief by a particular date and for a particular reason.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful (Quran 21:83). Job says how bad it is before anything changes, and the saying of it is not held against him.
۞وَأَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلضُّرُّ وَأَنتَ أَرۡحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ
Remember Job, when he cried to his Lord, ‘Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.’
Qur’an 21:83read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Among primary care patients, getting the treatment they had actually preferred was associated with better outcomes than being given the other one. So what a person believes will help is clinically relevant and not merely a matter of taste. It was an association found within a trial rather than a test of matching people to their preference, so it argues for asking rather than for handing the decision over.
Mergl R, Henkel V, Allgaier AK, Kramer D, Hautzinger M, Kohnen R, Coyne J, Hegerl U. (2011). Are treatment preferences relevant in response to serotonergic antidepressants and cognitive-behavioral therapy in depressed primary care patients? Results from a randomized controlled trial including a patients' choice arm.. Psychotherapy and psychosomatics doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A wish for fast relief that has been spoken about stops steering from underneath.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The chapter a diagnosis sits in was decided by a committee, and the medicines did not rearrange themselves to match. When you are thinking about treatment, it helps to look past the name on the file to what the person is actually carrying.
Take a few photographs of your bedroom, then look at them later and circle whatever has to change or go. Seeing the room in a picture shows you things you stopped noticing years ago while standing in it.
Something that settles a surge of panic within minutes and something that changes how often the surges come are doing two different jobs. A person can need both, and it helps to say which is which.