The issue today, is that people are expected to be productive all the time despite the isolation, low wages, lack of ownership, purpose, meaning and the raising inequality. And it is often those who are perceptive enough that tend to suffer more. If you don't want medications, then people need to have enough safety net to be unproductive for at least 3 to 6 months with some basic care, and this is luxury few people have.

And I agree with your second paragraph completely. I am sick of society pretending that people are "sick". They are not. They are responding naturally to an increasingly hostile world.

Psychiatrist and family member tend to fear relapses, and typically the effort required to enhance the situation is tremendous, and some situations are simply not fixable, they need to be accepted, time need to pass for healing, and attention need to be shifted elsewhere. The person would certainly lose some confidence in their own ability to withstand future pressures and tend to fear relapses as well, and yes there are financial incentives to sell pills and pitch as an easy fix. Thus, there is a risk of being dependant on the pills.

However, a good treatment plan is a mix of medicine and some form of talk/behavioural therapy. The medicine is designed to be temporary but might be necessary fix (unless there is a real hardware issue which I think is a rarity), and is usually combined with CTB and other form of talk/behavioural therapy aiming to strengthen healthy coping skills, eliminate damaging thoughts, change perception and take some actions. Do some people need medicine for lifetime? I don't know personally, but I've a feeling it is being overprescribed and it might cause more harm than good if taking for a long time. I mean, who knows what it does to the brain reward system if used long-term? I don't think it is well understood.

Ideally, people are given the time/care to heal on their own, around 3 to 6 months at least for severe depression and usually the person emerges at the other end have different perspective/interests in life. But the problem is the economical system is setup for constant productivity and 6 months of downtime for many of us is simply not an option.

We've had to ask you about this many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981889 (Oct 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28952194 (Oct 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27648887 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052513 (May 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405337 (May 2017)

That's not cool, and will eventually get you banned. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and eliminate this pattern, we'd appreciate it.

They are effective though.

The "thousands of professionals and the decades of research devoted to the topic" were mislead by pharma companies propagating the erroneous idea that depression and other problems are just chemical imbalances in the brain that are to be fixed with medication and that's that. So you can hardly blame them.

It will help if you read more slowly and if you don't get outraged during the process. Then you'll see that not one thing you said was something that I claimed. I never said not even one of the things you claim that I did.

A bit of a puzzling comment you posted, man.

Another hint: those thousands of professionals have a perverse monetary incentive. Food for thought. Some do good; I've met a few. Many others simply look annoyed and just hand you a prescription. We should do something about the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As someone with over 20 years of mental health issues who refused medication for exactly the same reasons - "sucking it up," trying to address root causes, meditation, spirituality, exercise...

... none of it worked. You could easily spend a lifetime trying to "root cause" the source of your malady and return empty handed, as I have. When the bills need to get paid, and your options are psychological collapse or some chemical attenuation of your mental state, I think the choice is clear.

I agree that it's sort of twisted that modern society is structured such that we need to constantly medicate ourselves to cope with day to day existence.

Alas.

Right there in the first line. "Any medication", "at all", and "with anything." Come on :)

Unfortunately I have had multiple family members recently deal with crippling and harmful bouts of depression and extreme anxiety.

They tried many things, but ultimately it was medication (not to remove the feelings, but just to help manage them) and long term counselling that helped things get better.

The medication alone is not going to help. But when someone can’t even get out of bed, or ,eave the house, or is so sad that everything becomes a dark fog, I disagree that medication is not required.

I’m now extremely grateful that I am in a position where I am able to afford it.

I have blood pressure issues. I try to eat right, and exercise. I have my whole life. I practice meditation and slowing down and generally feel fairly stress free as well.

I do this to address the “root” cause as you would put it. Unfortunately in this area I also need a little help from modern science, so I’m glad I have access to it.

I know of several cases where symptoms lasted for years. I know too many people who have had many different symptoms simultaneously while coming off of e.g. Effexor (with or without tapering dosage), ranging from flu-like symptoms for up to a whole year (meanwhile people moan about having 1-2 days of flu-like symptoms after getting vaccinated), horrible nightmares, cramps, headache, nausea, dizziness, worse depression than before, lethargy, insomnia, and the list goes on.

With "any other type of medication" you generally don't have to deal with withdrawal symptoms, so it's a bit unfair to compare them like that, although I agree to some extent that for some people, they are better than not being able to get out of bed, especially for people who can't afford to get alternative types of help, but people on anti-depressants are never like themselves before they started taking them.

And to add, they are IMHO not addressing the root cause of anything. People become 100% dependent on anti-depressants and after 1-2 days of stopping begin to experience withdrawal symptoms of varying intensity. Granted every person is different and will take different anti-depressants with varying dosages which will have varying impact on their psychological health. Sorry if this appears like a rant, I'm also glad for the existence of such medications but I think they are just handed out like candy without any consideration.

But it gives you time to teach teens coping skills, ingrain healthy habits, and get them through some of the tough teenage years, so you can then back down on meds when they are in a better place, with a better toolkit, to create adults who want to live.

I agree the meds are not the best answer in all cases. And there is nothing wrong with discussing their negative aspects. But that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose in some cases.

Especially cases where it truly is a chemical imbalance causing the depression. Which may be more cases than you realize.

From my perspective, the point of contention is whether we are doing this to a satisfactory level, or even "seriously" trying to. Like, what can we point to as humanity seriously trying, with the same seriousness we devote to other endeavours?

I wish I hadn’t tried to “tough it out” for so long and being scared away from medication after hearing things like they would numb you or make you feel like a robot. I don’t feel that way at all now that I’ve experienced a number of these medications firsthand.

As someone who’s long differed from anxiety and depression, I had your mindset at one point. It wasn’t until I started trying medication that I could start evaluating my life in a more objective manner, without the chemicals in my brain discoloring every thought. Now I don’t even need medication, but I am certainly a different person. Medication helped me choose a better life for myself.

Christ, people. You aren't necessary everywhere with your "actually" stuff. Chill.

I'm sharing what I observe and what I find disturbing. You can just ignore it.

“at all help with anything” sounds pretty absolute to my ears, as does the wording in basically every other sentence in what you said, but I’m glad to be mistaken. Though I note the person you responded to barely mentioned medication, and you seemed to find it necessary to denounce it in the strongest terms in a reply…

> * Psychiatric medication often simply numbs your brain...*

Notice the word "often". I'm not a 10-year old that claims that the 4-5 cases that I've witnessed represent the entire world and I'm getting tired of everybody here pretending that I'm some kind of monster.

Or maybe you're projecting too much?

Get off my back already. Read more slowly, don't get outraged, don't assume malice. Does wonders both to mental health and to the quality of online discussions.

You’re starting from a very specific worldview—the puritanical tradition where those upholding a certain set of virtues (industriousness, tolerance to pain, etc) will be richly rewarded (on earth or later) and, conversely, any suffering can be traced back to individual faults.

That mindset cannot survive contact with even trace amounts of actual data where, time and time again, medication does make a difference, although that difference remains frustratingly smaller than for other diseases. But it isn’t ‘numbing” of “fake” any more than antibiotics are.

You seem to believe antidepressants are like uppers or downers where you chuck a handful and ten minutes later you feel a wave of happiness roll over you. Here’s a secret: take a few of those pills and you will feel… absolutely nothing. Anti-depressants do not produce a “high” in any sense of the word. Changes in mood take months to appear and are usually not even recognized by the patient. It’s their friends who tend to notice it first.

There's two major tests for the efficacy of depression-treating drugs that I am aware of. One is a "willpower" test, which in one incarnation is attempting to drown a mouse. A compound more likely to be efficacious in humans if it makes a mouse attempt to swim longer before ultimately succumbing to exhaustion. Taken by itself this test seems promising, though one could argue it might blunt whatever mechanism makes you give up and try a different approach.

The second is a bit worse, and done in humans. A compound more likely to be efficacious in humans at treating depression also seems to be effective at disrupting short and long term memory. So, they give the sample and a short term memory test and see how you do. If you do worse it is likely to treat depression.

You will see, if you go back through past threads, people stating that their ADHD diagnosis was comorbid with or developed after a diagnosis of depression. It is extremely likely that they developed focus problems due to being treated with SSRIs.

You can look it up in any of the drug labels.

A 4-week study of inpatients meeting DSM-III-R criteria for MDD with melancholia utilizing Effexor in a range of 150 to 375 mg per day (divided in a three-times-a-day schedule) demonstrated superiority of Effexor over placebo based on the HAM-D-21 total score. The mean dose in completers was 350 mg per day (study 3).

https://labeling.pfizer.com/showlabeling.aspx?id=100#section...

Please understand that I am not anti-psychiatry at all. Your kid and their friends are best doing intensive therapy, and if necessary, sessions twice per week, outpatient. That is their best bet, health-wise. Because of taking Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) [SNRI] and Rexulti (brexpiprazole) for severe depression, I literally have suffered the worst thing imaginable, a drug side effect known as *akathisia*. In no exaggeration, it is worse than death. You have to move constantly, but it does not relieve the terror that you go through. You cannot physically relax at all. Your mind can only think haunting and terrorizing thoughts. It feels like you have been doused in gasoline, lit on fire, and you have been locked in a coffin. You literally survive moment-by-moment not to kill yourself. By the way, it is gruesomely painful from a perceptual standpoint. One time, when I was extremely sick, I went to the hospital and I had no idea whatsoever when I went to the emergency room that I was in sepsis along with diabetic ketoacidosis, due to being in the throes of akathisia. If you have it severely, it can cause violence and suicide. I had it severely and it lasted for about a year. I have 2 rare immune-mediated neurological disease plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent). I have been through really terrible things in my life due to my health but akathisia by far takes the cake. It is in no exaggeration worse than death.

Watch this video, this is what it is like every single day you suffer with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_iiy8ISvdY

This is a public PSA about akathisia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvhAilA070

This is excerpts from Jordan Peterson (whom I do not agree with from a political standpoint) who is a psychologist who suffered from it due to benzodiazepines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIfllfH0k3I

My story has a lot of parallels to this story: https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/06/boy-interrupted-a-story...

> It's past time the West reckons with our mental health crisis. Why is it that we're the wealthiest nations in the world, yet our kids are more stressed and depressed than kids in third-world countries? I think society will only become more and more unstable until we spend time seriously addressing that question and adjust our culture accordingly.

Like what? Do what Russia (along with the entire USSR) along with former Yugoslavia did to political dissidents?

Did you know that they used to put political dissidents in 4-point restraints and inject them repeatedly with Haldol, in order to induce severe akathisia as a torture method? If you did not appear "crazy" before coming in to some place like the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, you would appear absolutely "crazy" afterwards whenever you came out of there.

Have a read: https://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/soviet-psychiatric-dr...

Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

And just FYI, this effectively happened to me in America (although clearly I was not a political dissident). I got picked up by the police due to severe akathisia. I was forced to go to a medical hospital for "observation". I told the nurses that I could not have antipsychotics (which they give for agitation--although akathisia makes you extremely agitated) due to it invoking the akathisia and making it worse. About a week prior to this happening, I had just been diagnosed with akathisia. My world-renowned neurologist in movement disorders put a bunch of allergies in my medical record, including Haldol which he noted the reaction as "Akathisia". However, this particular hospital did not have access to my medical records (thank you "free market"). The nurses said that it was just an "adverse reaction" and therefore I was to receive it. They forced drugged me with antipsychotics and I had to move nonstop and I went really crazy. I was put in 4 point restraints and I was going so crazy that now I even know how to get those things off when they tie them extremely tightly.

Anyways, that was the last straw for me when it came to staying in the United States. I am a Croatian (European Union) citizen so I can live abroad in Europe. Nothing will convince me to live in the United States, even though I have been an American citizen my entire life. It is no longer my homeland. And just FYI, Russia Today did a whole propaganda documentary about people who ended up with akathisia (pretty much all of the people profiled in the documentary had it) consisting of Americans taking a bunch of pills. It is called OverPill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5722_XclQkY

Yes, it can. But if the underlying issue is that society and social structures are fucked up, and that's what's making people depressed, then a proper cure has to involve fixing society.

Where did I say that society is perfect, and that the only thing making people depressed is chemical imbalance?

I agree that our current society can be stressful, and that environmental factors[0] also affect people's behavior.

I agree that we can improve society through collective action, and hopefully that would lead to better quality of life for people, thus reducing the rate of youth suicide attempts.

However, I was addressing to OP's suggestion that medication will not "help at all with anything." Also that "Psychiatric medication often simply numbs your brain ... and it turns you into a robot."

So what are you defending here, exactly? Do you agree with OP? Is that why you are trying to attribute something to me I didn't say to make my argument seem absurd, instead of addressing my actual arguments?

0: Such as climate change, peak oil, the destruction of our natural ecosystem, the massive die-off of earth's biodiversity, and posturing from progressively more desperate super-powers

I suspect we would all be better off if we were kinder to each other and assumed the best rather than judges each other in this way.

Before the internet I doubt most people would be called ‘evil’ in their lives, now it’s almost punctuation.

This, among numerous other parts of your comment are in gross violation of HN rules, just for future reference

Consider that we know that mentioning suicide in the news increases the number of suicides. There is therefore a minor Info Hazard to mention suicides without the correct help structure in place.

You are by that original comment implying that medication is ineffective or a crutch. There are multiple other comments saying that comments similar to yours have let them believe that they should do without medication. So you are therefore doing almost the same thing yourself.

Crutches aid in healing, just as medication does for depression. And we should try to keep Info Hazards visible only in professional circles.

It's a risk. I'm not stigmatizing people for needing help and never will.

I can accept that my original comment came off a little bit more extremist than I intended but it's IMO also true that you all are projecting a little bit too much, and made me look like a monster who tell legitimately struggling people to suck it off.

I don't accept this. I didn't even imply it.

You really have to write that out, or people are right to prepare for the risk that you meant exactly what you wrote.

I'm amazed I even have to point that out.

And you... are only seeing what you want and need to argue with someone. I'm not your enemy here, get off my back already.

> Psychiatric medication often simply numbs your brain so it stops being worried about things that legitimately and truly torment it. It reduces your sensitivity, it knocks off your normal brain chemicals balance, and it turns you into a robot. I've had a family member go through this a long time ago. It was soul-crushing watching them when I visited. They were almost turned to vegetables with chemical means.

See, the problem with acting like you were trying to be reasonable and you "didn't mean it like that" is that I can go back to your post quote what you said.

I didn't "misunderstand" and I did not "only see what I want."

I am not going to accept your attempt to backpedal.

You said what I pasted above. I thought it was an ignorant thing to say. I responded.

> I'm not your enemy here

You absolutely are. I care about what is TRUE. You lie and say ignorant things that conveniently align with your values and try to pass them off as wisdom.

> get off my back already.

I will leave you alone after this final response.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861114

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861000

We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you right now, because I didn't see it elsewhere in your recent comments (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29755850, which was also unduly personal). But please review the site guidelines and make sure never to post like this to HN, so we don't have to ban you in the future.

Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, it's not ok to poison the ecosystem this way. Perhaps you don't feel you owe better to people who you feel are wrong, but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've been having to ask you not to do this kind of thing for many years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29220499 (Nov 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615528 (Jan 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384415 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480861 (March 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18761110 (Dec 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11885616 (June 2016)

If you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to ban you, so please stop doing it.

I got under attack, my comments have been misrepresented, and I'm defending myself. Admittedly not in a timid manner. But that tends to happen when you put people on the defensive by constantly almost copy-pasting the same criticisms.

What would you do?

You linked 6 instances of fairly minor transgressions (at least in my mind; tons of people mention downvotes and are NEVER warned; a lot troll openly, get heavily flagged, and weeks later I still don't see them warned).

This thread here is the first and biggest example and it's the first (and last) where I'd agree with you that I crossed the line.

Your comment is fairly saddening to me and feels like targeting, and/or as an effort to enforce an echo chamber. I am very sure that is not your intention so I invite you to write to me on my email so we can settle this properly with more and better nuanced discussion.

I stand by my conviction that I got misrepresented and got attacked by a lot of people who freely interpreted a comment not made in bad faith, while clearly demonstrating lack of benefit of the doubt themselves. Have they been warned like I am here?

And I'm the bad guy for having none of their attacks?

Ouch. There's something not cool.

Again, feel free to email me and maybe you'll see I'm not some sort of a villain spreading hate on HN. Unpopular opinions shouldn't go under a relentless fire.

If not, keeping quiet on HN is the easiest thing for me to do. I'll prefer it because I don't want to lose my account. But, for the last time, you're making a mistake and are likely misunderstanding me due to cultural differences. Please, do consider that.

This is how threads end up in a downward spiral [1], with each person perpetuating the flamewar while feeling like they're in the right and it's the other ones behaving badly. But flamewar comments like these ones you posted are just not ok on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863713

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863274

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861393

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861220

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861112

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861092

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861088

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861036

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29860983

If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, surely it isn't hard to see that such comments are the opposite of what we want on HN.

As for other users breaking the site guidelines, if you look elsewhere in the thread you'll see that I scolded a bunch of them just as much—for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868575

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868531

It always feels like the mods are against you [2] and that you're being singled out while others are let off lightly or ignored. That's not so. It just feels that way, similar to how it always feel like you're the one the cops pull over for speeding or the refs are always making calls against the home team.

What is true is that there are lots of comments breaking the site guidelines that don't get moderated, but that's not because we're treating them specially—it's because we don't see them all. We can't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here [3]. There's far too much.

Btw, it's better from my perspective to have these discussions in public because then there's a chance that others can see and learn from them. A 1-to-1 email conversation has far less leverage and the number of demands for moderator attention vastly exceeds the limited supply, which is why my worst-case latency in replying to emails is unfortunately so terrible.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

While I can't say with clear conscience that I agree 100%, I do agree with your general observations and would put my agreement percentage at, say, 80%.

This situation also gave me a good opportunity to reflect and understand that there's no point in stressing myself in HN so I will definitely stay away from such loaded topics for a long time.

I should have been here only for the technology news anyway so I'll stick to those. I will both protect my mental health and not dilute HN in one stroke.

Thank you for following up, it's much appreciated.

Depression and ADHD are _extremely_ treatable through medication, just as examples. There are many studies around this topic, it is way more treatable than certain physical conditions.

"Knocks off your normal brain chemicals" have you considered that some people's normal brain chemicals are not set up normally? Would you claim someone who is anemic taking iron supplements should stop cuz they're messing with that?

Naturalistic arguments like this lead to many people having way too much skepticism for things that are easily treatable. It leads to people dying. You should be ashamed of spreading this kind of nonsense.

EDIT: ADHD medication, when the right medication is given, has like 70% success rate at treating symptoms, and there's like 30% of people who express not just having symptoms reach manageable level, but total removal of all symptoms for their cases!

Imagine if we had magical robot prosthetics indistinguishable from actual human limbs. That is what we have for certain mental illnesses, for some set of people.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Depression is pretty wide and not fully understood. You can't just take the meaning of life and reduce it to a scientific problem. Yet that's what most of these kids are struggling with.

It's hopeful that the field of psychiatry is also experimenting with psycobylin as that at least will allow for people to come to some meaning on their own, in a journey rather than being numbed out.

Also what does anti-scientific even mean in this context? You can run a well set up experiment that turns people into vegetables and drastically sees a drop in suicide. Is it therefore correct? Don't forget this field is only 40 years away from lobotomies.

If there's a 25% chance you're going to kill yourself in 90 days, medication helps.

If you have a milder case and/or a very long time horizon, completely agree doing "root cause" work throughout your preferred method makes sense.

But it's not fair to the people suffering to say "I know you're bed bound but how about some cardio? Nah you don't need medicine that just numbs it". Why can't they get a little help when they're in a desperate place? Starting medicine doesn't imply a death sentence where it's force fed down your throat every day for the rest of your life. Take it for 6 months and stop when everything is going better and you have some reps of [your preferred recovery technique] under your belt.

I didn't see anyone claiming to be "pro-science", and I also didn't see anyone claiming that medication "does nothing".

It looks like to me that you completely misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the comment (I can't tell which one), and then got angry with the misrepresentation.

Another recent, worrying, trend (not unique to your comment) is that people don't see nuance and don't accept thoughts that don't match theirs. According to these people, you're either "pro-science" (and agree with them), or you are dangerous "anti-science" person spouting misinformation (how dare you see the world differently than me! Grrr).

I'm sympathetic to what you are saying that external factors are definitely at play (of course they are, in a sense. Mental illness characterised by social interaction will depend on factors of those social interactions). But you're dismissing internal factors!

For many mental illnesses, people are able to function on a day-to-day basis without treatment, but would feel better with proper treatment. And sometimes the cup overflows, and people suffer because of it. And people in the chorus of skepticism play into people not getting treatment.

But I can see that many misunderstood my intent, so likely my fault. All I was saying is that medication is over-represented.

That was all really.

I myself have been on CBD and it helped me. I know pills can be good temporary crutches. But IMO they are given away too quickly (anecdotal evidence) without much regard to what the person is actually going through.

I'm obviously aware that what I observed is not 100% of the cases. Really not sure what made so many jump on me claiming that I over-generalized. I didn't.

I'm on your side and on the side of many who are going through a rough patch, very much because half of my life was a rough patch. I'm all too aware. I was only saying that medication is a trigger-happy tactic (again in my statistically insignificant observations).

Generally agree with your comment but .... You're an adult. Decide what you need and take agency. The doc isn't forcing you to gobble pills and not do CBT.

The fact that they're available, and with low friction if it appears that you need them is great.

Here's a stupid analogy. To become a bodybuilder you need to lift heavy compound movements probably under a barbell over a long period of time. You have a scrawny kid come into your gym and he says he likes doing push-ups. Why not let him do pushups? Just because they're "too easy to access" and not the stack ranked force prioritized #1 option for hypertrophy?

In general were super prescriptive on what others should do, but most Americans don't exercise, etc.

More availability of a broader array of treatment modalities is a feature not a big IMHO.

I too saw people taking pills and becoming "robots" in the methaphoric sense. They were dull and not themselves, "just" without suicidal tendencies. It was absolutely devastating to live under a roof with them.

When I got a major depression, a decade back, I decided that I will not take any meds, because I'd rather die the person I was, than live on as an empty shell.

Did that mean I didn't get help? Hell no!

No, you didn’t. That sort of effect does happen with antipsychotics. The effects of antidepressants are as different from those as Aspirin.

A small hint: never tell anyone what they experienced, unless you were there or you're a godlike creature.

Edit: I asked again which pills, it was anti depressants. It was half a lifetime ago, doesn't change my or their experience.

So there, one anecdote vs. another.

I do agree with the general sentiment, though that has to do with the rulers of this world (not politicians).

And yep, my beef with psychiatric chemical help is exactly that: I want to see more will to repair the system and not treat more and more patients.