alt Hacker NewsOr avoid medication for anything but treatment resistant depression.
SSRIs are not well understood. Their side effects are not great. Getting off them is miserable. I had them. I felt dead inside. Mission accomplished. Depression was gone, so was my desire to eat, have sex, or do anything else. I wasn’t depressed, I was a zombie. 8 adjustments and medications later I got off them and realized they’re yet another pill to fix a problem 98% of people can fix other ways if they tried.
I do not understand this intense desire to be medicated. Exercise, go outside, talk to people. Get good sleep. Once the rest of your life is squared away get some meds if necessary. Psychiatrists and psychologist walk the razors edge of quackery every single day. Talk therapy is a program to take tremendous amount of money from people and funnel it into their account. It’s absolutely nuts the average talk therapist bills at over 300 dollars an Hour. There is no reproducibility in mental health. in their “science”. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe their magical pills will fix problems they barely understand at a biological level.
As a final note people in the military do a ton of cardio because running and rucking is hard work you train for. It is certainly not to “stay sane”.
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Medication is the fastest way to make some positive progress before you completely spiral and majorly fuck up your life.
Would you rather take a pill and keep working while you sort things out or would you try to rebuild everything after you burn it all down? Talk therapy and exercise may be just as effective or more so long term, but may not be effective enough in the short term.
Dunno why you are being downvoted, probably cope. It is well known by now that antidepressants are only marginally effective on average [1-2]. You're right they should probably only be prescribed for quite severe or treatment-resistant depression. Although the treatment-by-severity effect has been somewhat disputed [3-4], it has rough support [5], and makes sense since it is dubious that we should be giving ineffective medication with serious costs and side-effects to people with moderate depression.
[1] https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/69.abstract
[2] https://ebm.bmj.com/content/25/4/130.abstract
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1744-859X-12-26
[4] https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.116.187773
[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/18515...
yeah... i did forget to add meaningful community and spiritual activities to that list but people can have just as strong objections to them as they do to the other things on my list!
100% I have found the same, SSRI's definitely make things worse and I stay away from them, and regular exercise has offered the biggest consistent/persistent improvement in mood.