As the patient gets older, the medical treatment for the depression gets more and more complicated as the number of possible interactions between these drugs increases.

An average elderly person of 65 years takes around 8 pills a day, and whenever they have 2 or more pills simultaneously the possibility of creating an adverse reaction increases again enormously. Generally, medical interactions depend on the dose. A good advice would be “start slowly and continue slowly” in order to obtain the better result taking the shortest possible dose.

It is very important to reduce the amount of drugs, to adjust the dose and to choose the right medicine in order to avoid adverse reactions. We should also take into account the documented medical interactions concerning the wide variety of antidepressants and specific medicines of each type.

Each depression requires an individualized treatment, adjusted to each case, especially those of elderly patients. There is not yet a medicine effective for all the cases. Sometimes people are given a treatment which has already been proved and that may show different results, as the individual response depends on a lot of factors.

We introduce here the principal characteristics, of the main antidepressants used nowadays for elderly patients, as well as their medical interactions, and their pros and cons.