Can Antidepressants Cause Nightmares?

Can Antidepressants Cause Nightmares? (Find Out!)

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Yes, they certainly can. SSRIs like sertraline and citalopram and some SNRIs are commonly found to at best intensify and make dreams more vivid and real. They also lead to stranger, more confusing dreams and, for many, unpleasant dreams and nightmares. This is not limited to SSRIs or SNRIs, either.

 

If you are starting a course of antidepressants, then, you may well find that your dreams begin to intensify in strangeness.

That they will get weirder and feel more real, and for many, this can naturally translate to explicitly unpleasant dreams and nightmares.

Let’s look further into this.

Can Antidepressants Cause Nightmares?

Can any antidepressant cause nightmares?

Any antidepressant is going to be a chemical with a fairly profound effect on your brain chemistry.

This is the nature of the treatment.

That effect, in turn, always stands a very high chance of causing, at best, intense and vivid dreams.

That said, there are a number of antidepressants which are far more likely to have this effect.

Treatments used for persistent and severe depression are a lot more likely to cause nightmares and bad dreams.

As I mentioned, SSRI antidepressants such as sertraline, fluoxetine and citalopram are very widely used in these cases, and have a clear record of having a profound effect on dreaming.

SNRIs like duloxetine and venlafaxine also commonly have this effect.

All of this, however, is not all about nightmares.

It is simply broadly about the effect of intensifying dreams.

These antidepressants alter brain chemistry in such a way that you are likely to see changes in your dreaming habits.

Nightmares are, naturally and commonly, a further effect of this.

If you are about to start antidepressants and are worried about this, you shouldn’t assume you will definitely have nightmares.

Why do they have this effect at all, though?

 

Why do antidepressants give you nightmares?

There is, really, no simple answer.

Antidepressants are highly complex medications which alter our brain chemistry in ways most lay people couldn’t really understand on a nuts-and-bolts level.

Further, our understanding of dreams themselves is still fairly limited in a lot of ways, too.

As I’ve touched on, the simplest answer is that antidepressants work to fundamentally alter the way we think and the way our brains operate.

Why we dream isn’t completely understood, but our best theory is that it is the brain attempting to sort out the important and unimportant memories and emotions.

When that process is essentially encroached upon by the chemistry altering effects of antidepressants, it is understandable that dreams should become more vivid, and in turn nightmares more viscerally unpleasant.

On a more complex level, it is likely to do with the way serotonin is being inhibited or encouraged in the brain.

This is why SSRIs in particular have such a strong effect on dreaming.

So, how can I stop these dreams from happening?

 

How to stop antidepressant nightmares

There are a couple of things you can do to mitigate the effects of these bad dreams.

However, there is only a process, and there really isn’t a cure.

You may not have the dreams at all, but if you do, then you can expect vivid dreams at the very least, if not nightmares.

The best thing you can do to manage the dreams is to maintain a good and regular sleep schedule.

Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.

This gives you the best chance of having a sound sleeping pattern.

Often, the main cause of vivid dreams is frequently waking up in the night.

This increases dream recall.

Other than that, relaxation techniques can also help your body fall into a rhythm more naturally.

Meditation and aromatherapy are the simplest that you can try.

If you can’t shake the unpleasant dreams no matter what you try, you may want to consider requesting a change to your prescription.

The final question you should think about is whether nightmares themselves might be a side effect of depression in the first place.

 

Are nightmares a side effect of depression?

They certainly can be, yes.

Again, the idea that dreams are your brain working through different memories and complex emotions explains a lot about why they might be so heavily associated with depression and depression treatments.

Depression means your brain is literally imbalanced and physically altered in some way.

This, quite naturally, can very often lead to nightmares.

Treatment of depression is never really an easy thing.

It’s a bit of a minefield, and at least at the start it can often feel like you are simply trading one negative feeling for another.

Nightmares in particular can be very difficult to deal with, and for many they at first feel it would be better simply to endure the depression than the side effects of the antidepressants.

But my promise to you is that, with work, it will get easier, and there is light on the other side.

 

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