Talk with your clinician

An appointment can be hard to get to on a heavy day. Here's how to get ready, what to bring, and what to say once you're in the room.

Your medicine stays as it is

Please read this part first, and come back to it if anything later on seems to say otherwise. Keep taking your antidepressant, or any other prescribed medicine, exactly as prescribed. Arcana Mentis will never tell you to stop, skip, lower, raise, switch, or start a medicine, because this site can't see your body or your health history. Changing a dose on your own can be dangerous. Any change belongs in a conversation with the clinician who prescribed it, and the two of you decide together.

Asking questions is always fine. Maybe you've been polite in the doctor's office for years and left with the important question still in your coat pocket. Maybe a medicine was offered recently and you're unsure about it. Either way, you're welcome here. If you want help writing down what you've noticed, start with questioning the medicine. This page is about getting to the appointment and making good use of it.

Questions to bring

Write your questions on paper, in the words you'd use at your own kitchen table. You might ask what the medicine is meant to do for you, and mention what you've noticed about your sleep, your mornings, and your patience. You might say, "I've been wondering whether this medicine is still right for me." It can also help to ask what signs would mean it's time to talk about a change, so you aren't left guessing between visits.

Bring the heavy mornings, the lonely evenings, and the appointment you nearly canceled. If a friend told you to stop the medicine, write that down as a question for your clinician. Mentioning a worry is safe, and it doesn't commit you to anything. If your clinician has already told you to make a change, follow those instructions.

Getting to the appointment

Appointments are easy to put off when the morning is heavy. Put your list in your bag the night before. If making the phone call is the hard part, ask a friend to stay with you while you dial. If you've canceled before because the day felt too heavy, tell your clinician that too, since it's useful for them to know. If you can't make it, call the office and ask what to do next.

Once you're in the room, you might start with: "Here are my questions, and I'm not changing anything until we decide together." You don't have to be eloquent. If you've spent years being the polite one, you're allowed to use the whole appointment on yourself. If you're unsure about your treatment, it's fine to say so out loud.

Reading alongside care

The glossary calls this kind of page an adjunct to care, which means education that goes alongside professional help. It can give you words to carry into the appointment, and your clinician is the one who can examine you and talk through your treatment. If your questions are mixed up with a low mood, the depression room has more. If they're mixed up with a lonely week, medicine and loneliness gives the same advice: feeling lonely is never a reason to set a prescription aside on your own.

Everything on this site is about your own mind, so you won't find tips here for talking a clinician into an answer you've already settled on. Go in with the truth about how you've been, and make any decision about medicine together. If the night before the appointment turns into a crisis, go straight to the next section.

If you need care

If you're in crisis in the United States, call or text 988 (https://988lifeline.org/) now, before you read any further or make any decision about a medicine. You don't need a good reason or the right words. If you're outside the United States, call your local emergency number or a local crisis line. A real person can stay on the line with you.

If you're not in crisis, keep every prescribed medicine as prescribed until your clinician changes the plan with you, and bring the questions you wrote. There's more in the depression room, short definitions in the glossary (including depression and adjunct to care), and short answers, including the one about antidepressants, in the FAQ. Nothing on this page is for sale. This page is not yet medically reviewed.