Limitations of Contemporary Antidepressants: Tolerability

Antidepressant side effects are common and persistent. They can contribute to discomfort, distress,disability, morbidity, and mortality and can compromise the efficacy of treatments. Reducing the sideeffect burden, either by developing treatments that have a lower incidence of side effects or by usingtreatment strategies that alleviate side effects, would improve the standard of care for mood and anxietydisorders. In this article, the rates of common adverse events among the newer (posttricyclic era)antidepressants are compared with those among the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the mostpopular, contemporary first-line treatments for depression.