Alcohol and Antidepressants: What Happens When You Mix Them
MBBS, DPM (Psychiatry),Abhasa Rehab and Wellness
Clinical Lead with 20 years of experience in addiction psychiatry
Dr. Naveen Kumar V
MBBS, DPM (Psychiatry),Abhasa Rehab and Wellness
Clinical Lead with 20 years of experience in addiction psychiatry
- Last Medically Reviewed: 2026-08-06
- Published: 2026-08-06
- Last Updated: 2026-08-06
- 17 min read
Key Takeaways
- There is no single yes-or-no answer. The medicine you take, the amount you drink, and anything else you're prescribed all change the picture.
- Tier 1 (common, lower-acuity): alcohol plus an SSRI mainly stacks sedation. Drowsiness, slow reactions, poor coordination, a foggy next morning.
- Tier 2 (builds over time): regular or heavy drinking can blunt how well the medicine works and make anxiety and low mood worse as the alcohol leaves your system.
- Tier 3 (genuinely dangerous, and specific): alcohol with benzodiazepines or other sedating medicines raises overdose and slowed-breathing risk. Alcohol with older MAOI antidepressants can spike blood pressure.
- Alcohol does not directly cause serotonin syndrome on its own. That concern is indirect and lower-certainty, and it isn't the main risk here.
- Nothing on this page is a reason to stop or change a prescribed medicine. That decision belongs to your prescriber, every single time.
Most people arrive at this page for one small, ordinary reason. A wedding is coming up. Or a work dinner. Or it’s just Friday, and there’s an antidepressant sitting in the bathroom cabinet.
Here’s a finding worth opening with. A 2014 review in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine gathered published case reports of people who drank while taking an antidepressant (PMID 25214162).
The authors described what they saw as signal amplification.[1] In plain words, the same kinds of problems kept showing up across separate, unconnected reports. Often enough that nobody could call it coincidence.
So the interaction is real. But real and dangerous are not the same word, and that gap is what this whole page is about.
Scale, briefly. India’s National Mental Health Survey (2015-16) reported treatment gaps of between 70% and 92% across mental disorders, with common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety sitting near 85%.[14]
The same survey put the weighted prevalence of those common mental disorders at 5.1% of adults.[14] A lot of people are on these medicines. Very few were ever given ten unhurried minutes to ask about alcohol.
What does a drug interaction with alcohol actually mean?
A drug interaction means one substance changes how another behaves inside the body. Alcohol and antidepressants both act on the central nervous system, which is simply the brain and spinal cord.
Depending on the medicine and the amount of alcohol, the two can add to each other, blunt each other, or in a few specific pairings become dangerous.
One idea runs through everything below. This isn’t one risk. It’s three different ones of very different seriousness, and telling them apart is what keeps you both safe and sane.
Before you read further
This page explains what’s known about mixing alcohol with antidepressants. It is not a reason to stop, skip, or change a prescribed medicine on your own.
Stopping an antidepressant without guidance can cause its own problems. If you’re currently taking one and have a question about your own situation, that conversation belongs with the person who prescribed it.
If you’ve already mixed the two and feel physically unwell, or you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, please don’t wait it out.
Tele-MANAS (Government of India, 24/7): 14416 · Vandrevala Foundation: +91 9999 666 555 · iCall: 9152987821 · Medical emergency: 112 Reach out to Abhasa Rehab and Wellness today at +91 73736 44444.
Can You Drink Alcohol While Taking Antidepressants?
QUICK ANSWER
There’s no single yes or no. The answer depends on which antidepressant you take, how much you drink, and whether any other sedating medicine is involved. For most people on an SSRI, an occasional drink mainly brings drowsiness and slower reactions. Some other combinations carry far higher risk.
It depends on three things, not one
Doctors don’t answer this with a rule. They answer it with a short list of things they need to know first.
Which medicine you take. An SSRI behaves quite differently from an older MAOI. And both behave differently again from a sedative that might be prescribed alongside them.
How much, and how often. One glass at a cousin’s wedding is a different question from four drinks most evenings. The second one changes what the medicine is being asked to do.
What else is in the picture. Sleeping tablets. Anxiety medicines. Strong painkillers. Some cold and allergy medicines too. Alcohol plus a second sedating medicine is where risk climbs fastest, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the NIH, states this plainly in its guidance on mixing alcohol with medicines.[2]
Feels like a lot to weigh up? It is. And that’s exactly why the honest answer about mixing alcohol and antidepressants can’t come from a webpage. It comes from a two-minute conversation with whoever wrote your prescription.
First, what these medicines are actually treating
Antidepressants are prescribed against a diagnosis, not against a bad mood.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR) defines major depressive disorder by a set of symptoms that persist for at least two weeks and cause real distress or impairment.[15]
The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 codes a single episode of depressive disorder as 6A70.[16] Anxiety disorders sit in their own chapters, and the same medicines are often used there.
Alcohol has its own diagnosis. DSM-5-TR calls it alcohol use disorder, and ICD-11 calls the more severe end alcohol dependence (6C40.2).[15][16] Both are medical conditions with criteria. Neither is a character problem.
Why does this matter on a page about drinking? Because if both conditions are present, you’re not managing one problem with a side issue. You’re managing two, and they interact.
Three tiers, not one blanket warning
| Tier | What it looks like | Who it affects | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Tier
Tier 1: Sedation and impaired judgement
|
What it looks like
Drowsiness, slow reactions, poor coordination, a foggy next morning
|
Who it affects
Almost anyone who drinks while on an SSRI
|
What to do
Don't drive. Don't operate machinery. Mention it to your prescriber.
|
|
Tier
Tier 2: Blunted or masked benefit
|
What it looks like
The medicine seems to stop working; anxiety and low mood worse the next day; broken sleep
|
Who it affects
Mostly people who drink regularly or heavily
|
What to do
Describe your actual drinking pattern to your prescriber. No guessing, no self-adjusting.
|
|
Tier
Tier 3: Genuinely dangerous pairings
|
What it looks like
Alcohol with benzodiazepines or other sedating medicines (slowed breathing, overdose risk); alcohol with older MAOI antidepressants (sudden blood-pressure spike)
|
Who it affects
A smaller group, but the risk is serious
|
What to do
Never combine without explicit guidance from your prescriber. Treat severe symptoms as an emergency.
|
Notice what that table refuses to do. It doesn’t squash three very different situations into one vague warning, because a vague warning helps nobody. Someone who had a beer on an SSRI last Saturday needs different information from someone taking a nightly sedative alongside their antidepressant.
Not sure which tier your own situation falls into? That’s a fair question to bring to a psychiatrist, and it’s the sort of thing our clinical team is asked most weeks.
What Does Mixing "Lexapro and Alcoholism" Actually Do to Your Body?
QUICK ANSWER
Lexapro (escitalopram) and alcohol both slow the central nervous system. Taken together, they mostly stack that slowing effect. Drowsiness, poor coordination, slower reactions, and weaker judgement are the common results. Mayo Clinic also notes that alcohol can make low mood and anxiety worse the next day.
People searching lexapro and alcoholism are usually asking one of two things. Either “is one drink going to hurt me,” or “I’m drinking more than I should be and I’m scared to say so.” Both deserve a straight answer.
Alcohol is a depressant. Not in the emotional sense, but in the pharmacological sense: it slows down messages travelling through the brain and spinal cord.
Lexapro belongs to a group called SSRIs, short for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Serotonin is one of the brain’s mood-regulating chemicals, and an SSRI helps keep more of it available between nerve cells.
Now put the two together. Alcohol isn’t picking a chemical fight with escitalopram. What mostly happens is simpler and more mechanical: alcohol’s own sedating effect lands on top of whatever mild sedation the medicine already causes.
The result is more drowsiness than either would cause alone, plus slower reflexes and judgement that’s a little further off than it feels from the inside.
That last part is the one people underestimate. Impaired judgement doesn’t announce itself.
Three practical consequences show up again and again in clinical conversations.
- Driving becomes genuinely unsafe at a level of drinking that might have felt fine before
- The next morning feels heavier and slower than the amount you drank seems to justify
- Decisions made after two drinks are worse than the same decisions made before them
Mayo Clinic’s guidance on antidepressants and alcohol adds a fourth. Drinking can leave you feeling more depressed or more anxious, and it can hold back the benefit you’re taking the medicine for.[4]
None of that is rare or exotic. It’s the ordinary, well-documented, lower-acuity end of this topic, and it applies to almost everybody.
Some people typing lexapro and alcoholism aren’t asking about a wedding drink at all. They’re on an antidepressant, they’re drinking heavily, and the two things have started to tangle.
That’s a different conversation, and it isn’t a shameful one. A psychiatrist looking at drinking and medication together sees one picture, not two separate problems handed to two separate people.
Abhasa’s psychiatric team assesses drinking patterns and psychiatric medication in the same sitting, because separating them tends to leave both half-treated.
Is It Safe to Go Drinking on Zoloft?
QUICK ANSWER
Drinking on Zoloft (sertraline) carries the same sedation risk as other SSRIs. Sertraline is also prescribed often for anxiety, and that adds a second problem. Alcohol calms anxiety for an hour or two, then rebounds it higher as it leaves the body. Your prescriber should decide what is safe for you.
Searches for drinking on zoloft run high, and there’s a reason for that. Sertraline is one of the most widely prescribed antidepressants in the world, and it’s used for anxiety disorders at least as often as for depression.
The rebound problem
Alcohol is very good at taking the edge off anxiety, for about an hour.
What happens after that hour is the part nobody mentions at the bar. As blood alcohol falls, the nervous system swings the other way. Anxiety comes back, often stronger than where it started, and it usually arrives at three in the morning.
Sleep research explains a lot of this. Alcohol shortens the time it takes to fall asleep and pushes deep sleep into the first half of the night, then produces broken, restless sleep in the second half as the body clears it.[11] Wakefulness increases. Sleep-stage transitions increase. Morning arrives with a worse mood and a shorter fuse.
Sound familiar? Many people describe exactly this and conclude that their medicine has stopped working.
Why "my Zoloft stopped working" is often a drinking pattern
Here’s the trap. Someone drinks on Friday, feels flat and anxious all weekend, and reads that as evidence the antidepressant has failed. So they consider stopping it.
Please don’t make that call alone. Stopping or changing an antidepressant without medical guidance can cause its own set of problems, and it also removes the one thing that might be helping. The far better move is to tell your prescriber what your drinking actually looks like, honestly, and let them read the pattern.
Prescribers ask about alcohol for exactly this reason. Not to judge the answer. To interpret everything else.
If you’re not sure how to raise it, a confidential consultation with a psychiatrist can be a useful rehearsal for that conversation.
Why Do Alcohol and SSRIs Cause Sedation and Reduced Effectiveness?
QUICK ANSWER
Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which simply means it slows brain activity. An SSRI is already adjusting the brain’s mood chemistry. Sedation is the fast, physical layer of that overlap. Reduced effectiveness is the slower layer, and it builds only when drinking becomes regular rather than rare.
Sedation is immediate and physical. Alcohol slows nerve signalling across the brain, and it does this regardless of what else you’ve taken. Add a medicine with any sedating quality of its own and the effect grows.
NIAAA’s Core Resource on Alcohol makes the general point clearly: combining alcohol with medicines that cause sedation raises the risk of falls, road accidents, and in the most serious cases, fatal overdose.[3]
Most of that severe risk sits with a specific group of medicines covered further down. But the everyday drowsiness applies broadly.
The second layer is slower and easier to miss.
Alcohol interacts with the same serotonin system that SSRIs work on. Research published by NIAAA, part of the NIH, describes serotonin as closely involved in both alcohol’s effects on the brain and in mood regulation.[10] Regular drinking also disrupts sleep, and poor sleep alone worsens depression and anxiety.[11]
Put those together and you get a medicine trying to lift mood while a nightly habit quietly pushes down on the same lever.
Is that “cancelling” the medicine? No, and the next section deals with that properly. But it can genuinely reduce how much benefit you feel, and it makes the medicine much harder to assess. A doctor can’t tell whether a dose is working if something else is moving the same numbers.
Abhasa’s psychiatrists see this pattern often enough that drinking history is part of every psychiatric review, not an optional extra.
When Does Mixing Alcohol and Psychiatric Medication Become Genuinely Dangerous?
QUICK ANSWER
Two combinations carry real danger. Alcohol with benzodiazepines or other sedating medicines can slow breathing badly and raise overdose risk, which NIAAA describes as potentially fatal.
Alcohol with older MAOI antidepressants can trigger a sudden, dangerous rise in blood pressure. SSRIs on their own do not carry that acute danger.
This is the section that matters most, so it gets stated plainly and once.
Benzodiazepines are anxiety and sleep medicines. Many people taking an antidepressant are prescribed one alongside it, especially early on.
Alcohol and benzodiazepines depress the central nervous system through overlapping routes, and the combined effect on breathing is greater than either produces alone.
A clinical review published in Postgraduate Medicine describes this increase in central nervous system depression and overdose risk as well characterised.[8] Product labelling carries a boxed warning about severe breathing suppression when these medicines are combined with another depressant.[8]
The population data points the same way. In a CDC analysis published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, alcohol was involved in 27.2% of emergency department visits and 21.4% of deaths that involved benzodiazepines in the United States in 2010.[7]
That figure is not there to frighten anyone. It’s there because it’s the clearest evidence that this specific pairing deserves a specific conversation, and that conversation with a prescriber changes the outcome completely.
Warning signs that need emergency care: breathing that becomes slow or shallow, someone who can’t be roused, blue-tinged lips or fingertips, or deep confusion. Call 112.
MAOIs are an older class of antidepressant, prescribed far less often today, but still prescribed. Anyone taking one has usually been told about food restrictions.
The mechanism involves tyramine, a compound found in aged, fermented, and overripe foods. MAOIs stop the body breaking tyramine down normally, and too much of it can push blood pressure up sharply.
That event is called a hypertensive crisis. Mayo Clinic lists its warning signs as severe headache, nausea and vomiting, neck stiffness, sweating, nosebleeds, fast heartbeat, and chest pain.[5]
Alcohol matters here because some drinks carry tyramine. Guidance points to tap, home-brewed, artisan, and spontaneously fermented beers, plus home-brewed and artisan wines, as the ones to avoid.[5] StatPearls, published by the NIH National Library of Medicine, sets out the same dietary caution for people on MAOIs.[6]
If you take an MAOI, your own prescriber’s list is the one that counts. Not a general article, and not a friend’s memory of one.
A lot of pages blur this, so here’s the careful version.
Alcohol does not directly cause serotonin syndrome on its own. Serotonin syndrome is caused by excessive serotonin activity, and StatPearls, the NIH clinical reference, attributes it to serotonergic medicines, drug interactions, and overdose.[9] Alcohol isn’t in that driving-seat list.
There is one published case report describing serotonin syndrome after alcohol intake in a patient already taking two serotonergic medicines (PMID 30844852). A single case report is a signal to note, not a general rule, and it involved medicine combinations rather than alcohol acting alone.
So what’s the honest serotonin-related concern? An indirect and lower-certainty one. Alcohol disrupts sleep and mood regulation, both of which sit close to the systems an antidepressant is working on.[10][11]
That is a real reason to be thoughtful. It is a different and much smaller thing than the breathing-suppression risk described above, which is the primary, well-established danger on this page.
No sales note belongs in this section. Talk to your prescriber.
Does Alcohol Cancel Out Antidepressants? What the Research Actually Says
QUICK ANSWER
Alcohol does not switch an antidepressant off. Nothing in the research supports that idea. What regular or heavy drinking can do is blunt how well the medicine works, worsen sleep and mood, and blur whether your low mood comes from the illness or from the drinking itself.
The phrase does alcohol cancel antidepressants comes up constantly, and the instinct behind it is sound even though the wording isn’t.
What the evidence actually shows
Reviews of alcohol use among people being treated for depression consistently recommend that drinking be assessed and addressed as part of treatment, not treated as a separate matter.[12]
Studies looking at short-term response to depression treatment have examined heavy drinking as a factor in outcomes, with mixed findings that still point one way: drinking belongs in the clinical picture.[13]
Mayo Clinic puts the practical version well. Alcohol can hold back the benefit of an antidepressant and make symptoms harder to treat.[4]
So the folk theory is half right. Not cancelled. Interfered with, and much harder to read.
The measurement problem nobody mentions
Here’s the part that actually changes decisions.
If someone drinks four evenings a week and their mood stays low, neither they nor their doctor can tell what’s going on. Is the medicine wrong? Is the dose not right yet? Is the drinking driving the mood? Or is low mood driving the drinking?
Guesswork at that point is expensive. People stop medicines that were working. Others stay for months on something that genuinely isn’t suiting them, because the picture was never clean enough to judge.
Why a psychiatrist who treats both is different
Dr. Naveen Kumar V, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at Abhasa Rehab and Wellness, explains why the two questions can’t sensibly be split apart:
Most sources you’ll find online sit on one side of this or the other. Consumer health sites handle the medication safety question.
Addiction sites handle the drinking. Very few handle both in the same patient, which is exactly the situation many readers of this page are in.
Three things shape what Abhasa brings to it, in the order that matters here.
Dr. Naveen Kumar V, MBBS, DPM (Psychiatry), leads a psychiatric team with more than 20 years of clinical experience in addiction psychiatry.
Drinking and psychiatric medication get reviewed together, in one history, by one clinician. Co-occurring conditions are screened as standard through our dual diagnosis programme, because depression and alcohol use so often arrive together.
Medicine can lift a mood floor. It can’t rebuild sleep routines, evening habits, or the reasons the drinking started. Structured therapy does that work, and the Abhasa dual diagnosis programme is built around running both at once.
Assessment and follow-up can happen in person or remotely, depending on what your family can realistically manage.
And the line this section exists to make plain: your own prescriber comes first. Always. A second opinion, or a fuller dual-diagnosis assessment, is a step that sits alongside that relationship rather than replacing it.
If you’d like to understand what a combined assessment would involve, a confidential conversation with our psychiatric team is a straightforward place to start. Nothing gets decided in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Only your prescriber can answer that for you specifically. In general, Lexapro (escitalopram) plus alcohol mainly stacks sedation, so drowsiness, slower reactions, and weaker judgement are the usual effects.
Mayo Clinic also notes alcohol can worsen mood and hold back the medicine’s benefit.[4]
No, alcohol doesn’t switch an antidepressant off. Regular or heavier drinking can reduce how much benefit you feel and make symptoms harder to treat.[4]
It also makes the medicine much harder to assess, because two things are moving your mood at once.
Safety depends entirely on which medication. Alcohol with an SSRI is usually a sedation and judgement issue. Alcohol with benzodiazepines or other sedating medicines carries real overdose and breathing risk, which NIAAA describes as potentially fatal.[2][3] Ask your prescriber about your specific list.
Not directly. Serotonin syndrome is driven by excessive serotonin activity from serotonergic medicines, interactions, or overdose, according to the NIH StatPearls reference.[9]
One published case report describes it after alcohol intake in a patient on two such medicines (PMID 30844852), which is a rare event rather than a general rule.
Yes, quite differently. MAOIs interfere with how the body handles tyramine, and high-tyramine drinks such as tap, home-brewed, or artisan beers and wines can push blood pressure up sharply.[5][6] Anyone on an MAOI should follow the specific list their prescriber gave them.
Yes, always, and it isn’t a confession. Prescribers ask about alcohol so they can interpret everything else correctly, including whether a medicine is working. Reviews of depression care specifically recommend that drinking be assessed as part of treatment.[12]
For mild drowsiness, don’t drive, and contact your prescriber for advice. Seek urgent care for slowed or shallow breathing, someone who can’t be woken, severe headache with a racing heart, or chest pain. In India, call 112 for emergencies, or Tele-MANAS on 14416 if you’re in distress.
Taking the Next Step
If one thing survives from this page, make it this. Mixing alcohol and antidepressants isn’t a single hazard to be scared of, and it isn’t nothing either. It’s three different situations, and knowing which one you’re in is the whole game.
Most readers here are in Tier 1 or Tier 2. That’s an ordinary conversation with a prescriber, not an emergency. A smaller number are in Tier 3, and that conversation should happen soon rather than eventually.
Guesswork isn’t required of you here. Your prescriber knows your history and your full medicine list, and they’ve had this exact conversation many times before.
And if the fuller picture matters to you, the one where drinking and mental health are treated as a single story instead of two, that’s a conversation our psychiatric team is set up to have.
As Dr. Naveen Kumar notes, the two conditions rarely stay in separate boxes:
A confidential consultation with the clinical team at Abhasa Rehab and Wellness costs you nothing but a phone call, and nothing has to be decided during it. If you’d like to know what admission involves before speaking to anyone, our admission guide walks through it step by step.
For the fuller picture of alcohol dependence, detox, therapy, and aftercare, see our complete alcohol addiction guide.
Talk to Abhasa’s clinical team confidentially.
Call info@abhasa.in or +91-73736-44444 Our compassionate team understands what you’re going through
Continue Learning
- Antibiotics with Alcohol. A different medicine-and-alcohol question, handled the same careful way.
- Dayquil and Alcohol. Why over-the-counter cold medicines belong in this conversation too.
- How to Stop Drinking Alcohol. Practical support for cutting down or stopping, with medical help alongside.
- Alcohol Addiction: The Complete Guide. Our pillar page on causes, treatment, and recovery.
References
[1] Menkes DB, Herxheimer A. “Interaction between antidepressants and alcohol: signal amplification by multiple case reports.” International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. 2014;26(3):163-170. PMID 25214162. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25214162/
[2] National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “Harmful Interactions: Mixing Alcohol With Medicines.” NIH. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/harmful-interactions-mixing-alcohol-with-medicines
[3] National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “Alcohol-Medication Interactions: Potentially Dangerous Mixes.” Core Resource on Alcohol, NIH. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/health-professionals-communities/core-resource-on-alcohol/alcohol-medication-interactions-potentially-dangerous-mixes
[4] Mayo Clinic. “Antidepressants and alcohol: What’s the concern?” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/expert-answers/antidepressants-and-alcohol/faq-20058231
[5] Mayo Clinic. “MAOIs and diet: Is it necessary to restrict tyramine?” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/expert-answers/maois/faq-20058035
[6] “Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs).” StatPearls, NIH National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539848/
[7] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Alcohol Involvement in Opioid Pain Reliever and Benzodiazepine Drug Abuse-Related Emergency Department Visits and Drug-Related Deaths, United States, 2010.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 2014;63(40):881-885. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584609/
[8] “Risks, Management, and Monitoring of Combination Opioid, Benzodiazepines, and/or Alcohol Use.” Postgraduate Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4057040/
[9] “Serotonin Syndrome.” StatPearls, NIH National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482377/
[10] “Serotonin’s Role in Alcohol’s Effects on the Brain.” Alcohol Health and Research World, NIAAA. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6826824/
[11] Thakkar MM, Sharma R, Sahota P. “Alcohol disrupts sleep homeostasis.” Alcohol. 2015;49(4):299-310. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4427543/
[12] “Alcohol Use Among Depressed Patients: The Need for Assessment and Intervention.” NIH National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2874911/
[13] “Predictors of short-term response and the role of heavy alcohol use in treatment of depression.” NIH National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10680330/
[14] Gururaj G, Varghese M, Benegal V, et al. “National Mental Health Survey of India, 2015-16: Summary of prevalence, patterns and outcomes.” AIIMS-NIMHANS collaborative national survey, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5419008/
[15] American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Major Depressive Disorder; Alcohol Use Disorder. 2022.
[16] World Health Organization. ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics — 6A70 Single episode depressive disorder; 6C40.2 Alcohol dependence. https://icd.who.int/
- Medically Reviewed by
- Senior Consultant Psychiatrist & Medical Director
- Abhasa Rehab and Wellness
Medical Disclaimer: This article is for general information and education only. It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it must not be used to start, stop, skip, or adjust any prescribed medication. No dosing information appears here by design. Decisions about antidepressants belong to a qualified prescriber who knows your full history.
Stopping an antidepressant abruptly can cause discontinuation symptoms. Stopping alcohol suddenly after prolonged heavy drinking can also be medically dangerous. Speak to a doctor before doing either.
Seek immediate medical care if you or someone else experiences:
- Breathing that is slow, shallow, or laboured
- Someone who cannot be woken, or is deeply confused
- Severe headache with a racing heart, chest pain, or neck stiffness
- Seizures, or blue-tinged lips or fingertips
- Any thoughts of self-harm
Emergency and support numbers (India):
- Medical emergency/ambulance: 112
- Tele-MANAS (Government of India, 24/7): 14416 or 1-800-891-4416
- Vandrevala Foundation Helpline (24/7): +91 9999 666 555
- iCall: 9152987821
Our Editorial Process
This article was developed by the Abhasa Clinical Team and medically reviewed by Dr. Naveen Kumar V, MBBS, DPM (Psychiatry), Senior Consultant Psychiatrist and Medical Director at Abhasa Rehab and Wellness, with over 20 years of clinical experience in addiction psychiatry and dual diagnosis. Author profile: https://www.abhasa.in/articles/author/dr-naveen-kumar/
Every clinical claim on this page is attributed inline to a Tier 1 or Tier 2 source. These include peer-reviewed journals and reviews indexed on PubMed, government and institutional health bodies (NIAAA, NIH, CDC, WHO, and India’s National Mental Health Survey), diagnostic manuals (DSM-5-TR, ICD-11), and established medical institutions (Mayo Clinic).
This page contains no dosing guidance and makes no recommendation for or against any medicine for any individual reader. Every medication decision described here is routed to the reader’s own prescriber. It is reviewed on a fixed schedule and updated when guidance or evidence changes.