the goals and objectives of today's lecture are: to describe the target symptoms commonly associated with depression, incorporate concepts from pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacology, and therapeutics to select a treatment regimen for an individual patient with depression, to identify phases of treatment, desired therapeutic goals, and factors that determine the duration of therapy when managing patients with depression, to describe clinically significant drug interactions and adverse events with antidepressants and how to prevent or solve some of these issues, to develop a care plan for a depressed patient with selection and monitoring of appropriate antidepressants and community and hospital settings, and then to classify antidepressants based on their individual mechanism of action.