alt Hacker News> If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for.
This mistake has been made many time throughout history. Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression. Opioids and amphetamines too. You take them and you feel good for a while, which was mistakenly equated with treating depression.
Many drugs will make you feel good temporarily by blocking certain feelings or tricking your brain into feeling good. This is not the same as treating a condition.
You can think of actual treatments as working closer to the source to reduce the problem, not temporarily overriding it with a powerful drug-induced sensation.
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> Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression.
Is it not??
Sure there's the addiction and harm from abuse that make it less than ideal for long term use, to put it mildly, but weed isn't coke so what's really the argument here?
I mean, aren't they effective treatments?
As someone who has had depression literally as long as I can remember, being able to releve my symptoms when I really need it, even for just an hour, would be life changing.
How do amphetamines treat the source of ADHD?
Psychiatry as its practiced has no idea as to what depression even is under the hood. The entire science is based on the patients self reported feelings or the psychatrists feeling of how someone else is feeling.
What you're saying is something else, that drugs can produce long term harm despite short term improvements