The suicide warning for antidepressants is misleading. They don't cause it, but what happens is antidepressants start giving you more energy and more ability to function before it starts helping with mood.

So if you're already suicidal, you can get the ability to act on it before you start getting relief from ideation.

Good points.

It's also worth remembering that many people do benefit very fast from SSRIs.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2211759/

The idea that improvement was endogenous or exogenous is itself important for that person's resilience and esteem. So I wonder if there is a bit of a white lie there?

That’s darkly humorous. That a persons depression is the only thing stopping them from killing themselves. And to get to a better state they have to cross the stage where they are still depressed but have acquired a “can do” attitude.

End of day I think scrambling the brain is almost always the wrong choice. That these things are so heavily prescribed and marketed - what does that say?

It says nothing. They don't "scramble" your brain, or artificially make you happy, or any of the other ignorant things people have said. You are exactly the same person on AD as you are off of them.

This is like pretending that anyone who gets antibiotics is weak and if you just exercise, you can beat infected wounds.

Before antibiotics, people just died from wounds. Before AD, people spent their whole lives trapped by things we can do something about now.

> You are exactly the same person on AD as you are off of them.

Psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs are mind-altering substances. They place people in an "altered state of consciousness". Does this sound familiar.

When my cousin was afflicted by chronic major depression, and he was prescribed Prozac, his mother commented "it's like I have my Joey back!" because his mood had lifted and he was acting very differently, different from his behavior in the past year or so, perhaps more like he was as a small child.

Of course this behavior was mostly because he had been seeing a therapist and was getting some positive attention and reassurance. The SSRI drug soon triggered progressively more intense outbursts of rage and irrational behavior, and it would not be discovered for 5 years that he actually had a more serious mental illness, and the diagnosis and administration of SSRIs had been hasty and improper, exacerbating his condition.

I'm sorry, but your cousin's mom's goofy nickname for them is not a relevant anecdote.

I have been on several and I'm speaking from experience. They do not make you happy. They do not induce euphoria. What they do is relieve depression. Instead of being nonfunctional and crippled, you get some energy and mood back. Ideally, enough to let you work on other things and help you get back to stable.

Plenty of people only need them for a limited time, and that's just fine.

I don’t think it’s anything line antibiotics. I don’t judge people for taking brain scramblers but I think it’s obvious they are vastly over prescribed. 20% of women are on some form of them. There’s no way that’s natural. There must be a reason you don’t see the mass adoption of these kinds of drugs in most other countries.

It’s also created a culture of using a pill to solve a problem and yes in some extreme cases it’s probably necessary but I think there’s bigger issues and lots of people with very poor values that create lasting unhappiness.

Why would you consider that not to be normal? Humans have plenty of inherent physical flaws - we have terrible backs and knees, for example. Also, plenty of other countries have similar adoption of ADs.

There was no magic beforetime when we were all happy peasants or hunter-gatherers, singing in the countryside. Humans have always lived with pain and depression and suffering, and to pretend there's any moral good to that is ridiculous, no more than there's any moral good to dying from an infection.

People are so weird about things that actually help others.