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.
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.