Fedez's drug-resistant depression: what it is and how to treat it

In Italy one in five people suffers from depression20% more than in the pre-pandemic period, and at the same time the use of psychotropic drugs. The statistics also speak of the increase in emotional disorderswith the prevalence of anxiety And depression among adolescents (Source Unicusan 2022).

“The average age of onset of the disorder has dropped,” states the Dr. Vincenzo Villari, Director of the Neurosciences and Mental Health Department from the City of Health of Turin, adding: «depression is a disorder of mature age, but today there is certainly a great deal of attention paid to the discomfort expressed by young people. Adolescents or young adults experience a discomfort that is very complicated and very difficult to define, and which has mainly two causes. One is it digital stress induced by device electronic, and the second the dependence from social media. These two aspects create a lot of vulnerability additional, compared to previous decades, which however is the price of contemporaneity, and must be faced”.

The rapper Fedez recently told the audience of young people present at the Turin Readers' Club of having suffered from a form of depression drug-resistant: so strong that it resists treatments: what is it about? «Drug-resistant depression consists of a chronic depressive clinical picture who does not respond to the use of two or more antidepressants with different mechanisms of action, taken at an adequate dosage and for a sufficient time”, explains Villari.
How can you get out of it? «Today, new therapeutic approaches are available: one, farmacologicalwhich is implemented by integrating the drugs already taken with esketamine, which is usually taken with intranasal administrations (in practice with nasal spray); the second approach, non-pharmacological, consists of application cycles of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) which in some cases has given good results”, highlights the psychiatrist.

It should also be added psychotherapywhich is «the other leg on which the therapy of depression is based”, specifies the specialist. «The one that has the greatest number of scientific evidence of effectiveness is the cognitive behavioral therapy. But there are also other psychotherapies, including that of deep, which can be important to counteract aspects that sometimes precede actual depression, and which can be personality disorders or neurotic disorders.”

Commenting on the case of Fedez, who also recounted how, at a certain point, feeling that the treatments weren't working, he suddenly abandoned them all, Villari is also keen to recommend that: «this is exactly the thing that shouldn't be done: he himself said that he felt terrible because he spontaneously adopted a remedy that was worse than the disease. Absolutely you don't have to cure yourselfbut always contact specialists”as the rapper himself ultimately underlined.