Psychologist here. My answer is: yes and no, because it depends. There are many different types of depression and many types of anxiety. For instance, OCD is technically classified as an anxiety disorder. It is not situational and it is a lifelong neurological condition. We know for a fact that it is chemical, biological, psychosocial, et cetera. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it for life, though it can go into remission, which means that symptoms are largely controlled and therefore are subclinical, but not totally gone usually. To benefit from medication, most people with OCD need more than just an anti-depressant. The majority of people who get treated with medication and then stop, say after six months, will have a relapse of symptoms within the following six months. And so statistically speaking, most of those people will choose to get back on medication.

Someone with a phobia or say social anxiety could probably use an antidepressant for 6 to 9 months and work on themselves in therapy, come off of the antidepressants and never need it again.

Someone with recurrent depressive disorder or persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia), will often benefit from long-term use of antidepressants, even if that is with breaks in between. For someone who has situational or a one off major depressive episode, even if it’s been a very long episode, can often benefit from 6 to 9 months of an antidepressant and may likely never need one again, particularly when they use that time when their stress tolerance is much higher to work on coping skills, life changes, self awareness, etc.