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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
For the right person the trade is a good one: nothing to become dependent on, no withdrawal, no dangerous mixing with alcohol, and nothing to reach for in a crisis either. They are for taking daily and judging after a month. If someone has been using one as a rescue and finding it useless, that is not a failed medicine so much as a mismatch between what it is and what it was being asked to do.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people (Quran 16:69). The healing arrives at the end of a slow process rather than on demand.
النحل
ثُمَّ كُلِي مِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ فَٱسۡلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلࣰ اۚ يَخۡرُجُ مِنۢ بُطُونِهَا شَرَابࣱ مُّخۡتَلِفٌ أَلۡوَٰنُهُۥ فِيهِ شِفَآءࣱ لِّلنَّاسِۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَةࣰ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
Then feed on all kinds of fruit and follow the ways made easy for you by your Lord.’ From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people. There truly is a sign in this for those who think
Qur’an 16:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Slower routes can leave something behind them. People followed up after cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety still had measurable benefit a year or more after treatment ended, though the gap between therapy and the comparison conditions narrowed across that time. That work is about therapy rather than any particular tablet, so take it as a case for judging slow approaches over a long horizon rather than a claim about this one.
Eva A.M. van Dis; Suzanne C. van Veen; Muriel A. Hagenaars; Neeltje M. Batelaan; Claudi Bockting; Rinske M. van den Heuvel (2019). Long-term Outcomes of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety-Related Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A medicine that works by slow adjustment cannot do anything within the hour.
Sedatives are good at damping the body down and much less good at quieting a mind that keeps going round. If the trouble is chronic worry, being made drowsy is not the same as being helped.
If something helped one part of your anxiety and did nothing for the rest, that is not proof it failed or that you are beyond help. Different parts of this run on different machinery.
These medicines work on a timescale of four to six weeks, not days. Say the number out loud at the start, because someone expecting relief this week will have decided by Friday that it failed.