Background: Depression Following Stroke

When the patient was first admitted into the hospital due to stroke and was subsequently staying there to do physiotherapy, the doctors there had never wanted him to take any of those psychiatric medicine, despite being told by the wife that he has had a brother who committed suicide due to depression. The reasons given is that those medicine was causing him drowsiness and tiredness, so he’d be spending so much time in bed that he couldn’t do his physiotherapy and necessary exercise.

People often care only about their physical health, whether any part of their body is aching, body temperature is within the healthy range, diabetic or not, blood pressure is not too high, etc etc. This thought is possessed by many including clinicians, health professionals, doctors etc. So quite often when patients are admitted into hospital, for for example, gastric, intestine bacteria infection, fever, cancer, etc, they are advised by the clinicians to stop taking their psychiatric medicine.

So what happened when they stopped their antidepressant, anti-anxiety and/or anti-psychotic medicine? What happened when patients get slightly better in their physical health?

They can’t manage the stress and cope with the recovery process related to their physical illness. Some kick off, shout, throw things, self-harm, hurt others, restless, unable to sleep… They deteriorate so badly that they be treated for their physical illness. Some may be okay, but once they get recovered in their physical illness, their mental illness is again unmasked and has become even harder to treat as they have stopped medicine completely.

A lot of people need to take anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medicine to cope with their recovery from cancer, stroke or other illnesses. There is no point to recover from a stroke, being able to talk, mobile and function more normally, then have the patient to jump off the building or sea and lose their lives. Whether or not he is diabetic, immobile, body aching, has had stroke, gastric, cancer, high blood sugar… … if this person has had mental health problems, he then will have to take medicine for it.