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Rachels history is that she has been treating herself for depression since middle school age either through alcohol, marijuana, or about 5 years ago started taking sertraline. About a year ago during relationship counseling our therapist asked her about why she was on sertraline so long. He informed us that she shouldnt be on it. Right around the same time Rachel gave up alcohol. Fast forward to now and Rachel is still alcohol free, been seeing her counselor regularly learning CBT and through some slow reductions she is off of sertraline.
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Wait, what? Since when is there some kind of time limit on sertraline? And why is a therapist giving medical advice? That seems kind of unethical, honestly.
From my therapy experiences, it seems common for counselors to have no understanding of the biological aspects of mood disorders. Like, the fact that depression is an
actual medical problem is an idea that has never even been
suggested to them. Somehow their training just doesn't include that. I'm not sure if they think SSRIs are euphoriants or what.
Therapy including CBT is still useful (potentially) because depression can really mess with you and give you weird ideas (cognitive distortions), especially if you're consistently depressed for a long time. Even if you fix the biological problem, that doesn't fix the weird ideas, but therapy can. You just have to keep in mind that your therapist probably has this huuuuge blind spot in their understanding of the situation.
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Is there a better medicine?
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There may be medicine that is better for her. There's no medicine across-the-board better than sertraline for everyone, so there's not much way for anyone to tell you which med she should try. (There's supposed to be some newfangled genetic testing available to help with that though.)
If the only problem with the sertraline is the fact that some ignorant therapist opined she shouldn't be taking it, then she could go back to that.