Quote from: gentlemand on September 28, 2019, 07:01:58 PM

There's happiness and sadness. And then there's the total ruin of a normal brain's balance.

Antidepressants have zilch to do with whether you're a bit glum or not.

My own mind's stability is as solid as a reasonably-sized continent but I've seen enough people who weren't to know there was something extremely fundamental going wrong with them. When you think about the infinite intricacy of what's up top I'm deeply impressed at how many functional people there are.

It still amazes me how primitive psychiatric treatment is though. And no doubt many are getting unhelpful 'help'.

As long as depression is a reaction of lifestyle, you can heal it yourself. I don't say it's easy, though.
For example, i had a combination of poor self esteem and using the very wrong substance (LS*) after a traumatic stress event.
On this last trip of mine, the whole fucking world became dull and dark, every human being i saw was just crawling in its own sadness. "Noone can ever be truly happy as a human".
When i came down, everything went gone but these feelings persisted. I came over this with temprorary use of SSRI and changing the mindset that led to my poor self esteem.

On the other hand, when depression is the cause, not the symptom, because of unbalanced hormone levels or brain chemistry, medication is about the only option.
It's just that doctors tend to get used to easy solutions that work, so both types of depression are treated quite the same way.
That's part of the unhelpful help problem, i guess.