[Rational use of antidepressants in general medicine]

Depression is a common cause of morbidity and is frequently recurrent. Therefore, treatment must be oriented more and more to the prevention of relapses in addition to the cure of depressive episodes. Long-term administration of antidepressant drugs becomes thus the rule and, as a consequence, general practitioners are increasingly concerned by the prescription of such medications. The choice of an antidepressant is mostly oriented by the side-effects profile of the pharmacological class of the compound. Fortunately, more recent drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and reversible MAOIs (monoamine inhibitors) have a very higher security index than tricyclics and classical MAOIs.