What is the effect of major depression on multiple sclerosis?
When a multiple sclerosis sufferer has major depression, this can lead to negative effects because generally speaking there can be issues with compliance, in other words, the patient won't always take the medicine they should when they're depressed. They're usually having spousal or marital problems and the other thing is that we don't know what it does for the immune system, but sufferers of both multiple sclerosis and major depression just don't seem to do as well. So treatment of that is very agressive, initially counselling may work, they can go to a psychologist, talk about their disease and how it is impacting them and so on and so forth, and there are a number of psychologists around big cities that are really familiar with MS that patients can be recommended. If the patient doesn't respond well to psychological treatment then pharmacologic agents can be used. Usually, if it is what we call a reactive depression to the multiple sclerosis disease, they don't have to be treated for more than six months or a year, and they basically seem to adjust to it when they see they are doing well. If they are reacting poorly then you it must be deal with further, but so many of the patients do so well after the initial episode that they generally don't need to be treated for depression for very long.
