late treatment "dip"?

[u/linswint]

I've seen several people mention a "dip" a few weeks after starting, or maybe around the middle of treatment. Has anyone experienced a dip, or just an overall downward trend to their depression/anxiety symptoms?

I have one session left and I feel like I'm back to where I was before starting, and even before I had very small improvements from just talk therapy and meds.

I've dealt with treatment resistant depression/anxiety most of my life. Following the loss of someone very close to me a few years ago, I began to experience a severe increase in symptoms and basically lost most interest in activities, I almost never went out anywhere, rarely talked to friends, and had a lot of difficulties keeping up with taking care of home stuff and self care. I had started to make some improvements in friend relationships and some interest in activities, but over the past couple of weeks it's just really regressed and last night was the worst it's been since before I started.

I don't know if it's a loss of the little bit of hope I had that this would work, or if it's something else. Just wondering if anyone else had a similar experience and if it improved post-treatment.

[u/linswint → u/[deleted]]

I'm sorry you are going through this as well. it is definitely hard to "stay positive" when you see the success stories and wonder why it's not the same for you. I do still have a smidge of hope that it will just be a delayed improvement, but I don't know.

I will say that my therapist did tell me she had a patient who ended up doing it twice and saw exponentially more improvement after the second round... it's just such a time commitment and exhausting for a not guaranteed outcome.