Absolutely correct, it can be a life-saver, but patients should also be aware that many people get permanently ruined by the medication prescribed by so-called professionals - especially antipsychotics and antidepressants - so to try it is to take a big gamble. Medicine should be the very last thing tried to help people with mental problems. Not the first as it is today and likely not the second either. It is, in many many cases, incredibly harmful or totally superfluous. I'd go so far as to say that IMO at least 9 out of 10 in the psychiatric system is over-medicated and/or misdiagnosed. Most people I have seen that get medication end up in one of three situations being either life-long medicinal dependency, polypharmacy or misdiagnosis. All could be prevented by a working psychiatric system without close ties to Big Pharma.

Most people that get antidepressive medicine isn't heavily depressed and shouldn't get medicine at all:

>Conclusions: The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/18515...

>My guess is that future generations of psychologists will look back at our over-prescribing of psychotropic drugs with incredulity too, amazed at our blind enthusiasm for largely ineffective and damaging treatments, and at how such barbaric methods could become so widespread.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201...

If you go in with a headache and get prescribed an antipsychotic, sure. If you have severe depression that just goes away with the right drug, isn't that solving the problem?

The problem with overmedication is when the drugs don't work, or don't work properly. A competent professional would work with you to find the drugs that work for you, not say “here, take this, not interested in hearing your symptoms”. It's usually possible to know when you've got a bad doctor, and usually possible to seek a second opinion.

Better to seek help than suffer alone.

> If you go in with a headache and get prescribed an antipsychotic, sure. If you have severe depression that just goes away with the right drug, isn't that solving the problem?

The problem is that often medication is prescribed very quickly and virtually no supervision happens. This is a very bad combination in general, but especially if the patient is suffering from a mental illness. These drugs literally list things like suicide among their side effects and it is extremely irresponsible to prescribe them to someone and then tell them to check back in 3-6 months or so. But this represents standard practice.

Take a depressed person who wants to commit suicide, but is too depressed to do it. Put thing on an anti-depressant that raises their mood and improves them over the course of a few weeks. There risk for a period in there where a patient has not exited self-harm territory, but now has energy to do things - including self-harm.

The drug isn't causing suicide. It's just unfortunately taking a patient through a risky period.

Many people do not understand that anti-depressants don't work instantaneously. They take time. That is where the risk comes from.

I agree with the supervision part but imagine you're a doctor, you have these meds at your disposal and someone comes to you suffering with what you assess to be a condition that you know a certain med is 90% effective. Wouldn't you give it to them and simply risk that they might be in the 10% that it doesn't work or maybe the 0.1% that it'd cause a bad effect? Should we eliminate medication because it isn't 100% effective for everyone and sometimes has adverse effects?

If medication A is 80% effective, 10% useless and 10% major side-effecty, and medication B is 5% effective (half of the A-useless people), 90% useless and 5% “causes headaches”, which do you try first?

That's why there is a profession, to make these kinds of judgements. But what is the alternative? People that are going for medication don't usually have many choices. If it wasn't too taboo and there wasn't so much misinformation around this then people wouldn't have to end up in situations where you just need to take something asap because you've been catatonic for the past 4 months and/or you're having paranoia and delusions and your life is going to hell. These are real life struggles, we can't be theoretical and aim for the ideal. Science improves and it's certainly better than it was in the past.

> Medicine should be the very last thing tried to help people with mental problems

Really? They should just keep on suffering and do what? Snap out of it by the power of their will?

> Most people that get antidepressive medicine isn't heavily depressed

And let it evolve to chronic "mild" depression and possibly more severe mental illness, instead of treating it with an off the shelf anti-depressant today..

Medication helps lots of people and it's very effective, very quickly. If someone is suffering a lot of the time they don't need to be and this narrative of "only meds when it's severe" is why so many people go undiagnosed, untreated and later develop worse conditions in which they may not have a chance of full recovery.

Treat it when it's early, meds in moderation and with supervision.