Tag: Emotional processing

According to the World Health Organization, depression affects over 280 million people globally, making antidepressants a widely used treatment. This has led many to question: **do antidepressants change the way you think** or just lift your mood? The answer lies not in a change of your fundamental personality, but in the medication's ability to alter emotional and cognitive processing to foster a more balanced perspective.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that in people with depression and anxiety, the brain's amygdala often displays heightened activity in response to negative stimuli. Addressing this overactivity is one of the key therapeutic goals of sertraline (commonly known as Zoloft), which works to modulate emotional processing pathways.