It sounds like a legit factor in a malpractice lawsuit.
Luckily I only did it for about 4 years before I snapped out of complete lack of appreciation from my employer and realized that if _I_ didn't take control of my life and demand appreciation, respect, and time off, that I was going to waste my entire adult life. Took my dad about 40 years to realize.
I mean, yeah, if you work 60 hours a week, commute 2 hours a day and drink 3 beers a night, you spend Saturday recovering, Sunday wishing you had energy for side projects and then Monday hits, cool, we didn't have to think about crushing depression. This is what happiness is, right fellow Americans?
People report feeling good despite taking a depressant, and self-medicate their depression with alcohol.
Worth noting that "depressant" in the drug sense is anything which slows down the action of the central nervous system, it doesn't have anything to do with the mental state of depression.
Some of the drugs most known for bringing on a state of euphoria are depressants (eg; opiates).
The mania triggered by this story should have been just as concerning as the depression.
I do this too but to scrape the bottom of the barrel on philosophy problems. It's basically like doing drugs.
Finally they spoke to one of their preceptors. The advice? Double up your shifts for a week and grind yourself down until you absolutely are sleep deprived (they are all generally sleep deprived in this program, but have stretches of 3 or 4 days off). It seemed almost sadist to me, but they did it.
We were all surprised when it more or less worked. I would say it bought them a month here, a month there when needed. It seems like a terrible strategy over the long term but something was definitely going on. They called it a "big reset" and also insisted that they had an overall sense of euphoria for a week or so following each "dosing".
They don't do it anymore, after trying a few different medications a particular SSRI really seemed to click and it's been 20 years now without a major recurrence.