[amputect]

I basically agree with your friend, but I'm pro-drugs for pepole who find them helpful. I very strongly suspect that the underlying "problem", like with cancer, is actually an enormous variety of problems that cluster into vaguely similar symptom groups. I am absolutely not an expert here, this is a layperson's opinion, but it's really hard to imagine that there's just one specific cause that we're treating. I think that's why different drug classes vary so wildly in effectiveness from person to person, there's a ton of underlying confounding variables that we simply don't understand.

But what we do know is that anti-depressants can be a powerful tool for helping people who aren't responsive to other types of treatment. Even if it takes some effort to figure out which one is the best fit for the underlying disorder, that's better than nothing.

[ggm]

Yes, but we need professionals to be more overt we are groping in the dark I think.

The recent news about why ketamine works is a very specific aha moment, they showed a focussed impact on a brain functional element which seems to re-stim negative ideation and so blocking it relieves a cycle and then permits some kind of reset. Layman's analogies.