[mnm1]

It took me about a year to get to the point the author describes where I felt nothing and didn't care whether I lived or died. I wasn't suicidal--at last I don't think I was--but I was rapidly approaching that point. I was so desperate, I let the doctor put me on benzodiazepines for anxiety even though I knew from previous experience that I would not only become dependent but addicted. After seven years of that, I had enough and stopped seeing all doctors. I weaned myself off the benzos as no doctor I saw even knew how to do it nor did they want to. It wasn't as hard as I thought. After I was off that, the hard part started. Over the course of years I learned how to deal with life again. Eventually I took up running, my own meditation equivalent and soccer. Slowly things improved. It's not always great and many of the original problems are still there but they are mostly manageable.

I'm lucky to be alive really. I try to remember all this suffering at the hands of doctors and the pharma industry that could have been avoided. I will have trust a so called mental health professional again, especially if they are drug pushers. The conflict of interest was readily apparent throughout the whole ordeal both when taking antidepressants and benzodiazepines. It's funny how we demonize some drug dealers while having insurance coverage for others. And all this without a single shred of proof that these medicines work, that there is even such a thing as a chemical imbalance. Because there isn't. If this is what mental health doctors call facts, the entire establishment has failed and derailed into nothing more than making humongous profits from getting people addicted to the drugs they push. It's fucking disgusting.

[simen]

I sympathize with you, I really do. I've had some similar experiences. But you're overstating the case. Numerous meta-analyses have found that antidepressants do work for people with severe depression, much better than placebo. Unfortunately there's many people for whom they don't work, and even when they work you may have to try many different kinds to find the right one(s). The state of depression treatment is sadly not very good right now, everyone knows this. But it's just not true that there's not "a single shred of proof that these medicines work".

Depression treatment doesn't depend on "chemical imbalance" as an explanation either. Research on whether antidepressants work proceeds alongside research on why they work, if they do--usually studies on the efficacy of drugs are completely independent of mechanism. They study clinical outcomes, not neurochemical or larger structural brain issues.

So even if we had no idea why antidepressants (potentially) work, we could still know that they do work based on clinical outcomes. And it's not exactly true that we have no clue at all. The past 20 or so years the monoamine hypothesis hasn't been the main avenue of research into the neurobiology of depression. These days, it's at best considered one possible factor, not the defining and only factor. There's a lot of research into the structural changes that follow depression and recovery. For instance it's now known that serotonin helps regulate the expression of BDNF, which in turn regulates the growth and repair of brain cells and synapses. So it may well be that serotonin triggers large-scale "repairs" in the brain in areas related to emotional processing, such as the amygdala. Here you can see that the focus isn't so much on individual levels of "chemicals" in the brain as on the structure of the brain and how different natural and exogenous factors affect that.

[gcb0]

just because it works better than placebo doesn't make it the best treatment.

all over the world, terapies works better than antidepressants, with infinitely less undesirable side effects for patient and society. yet in the US it is very common to treat depression (and many other conditions) with drugs alone.

arguments against drugs is not favor of "don't do anything". that argument would be extremely dumb.

just to give some perspective on how badly interpreted the data is in your argument: brain-splitting surgery, which is still used for epilepsy, also shows a cure for several other conditions, yet nowadays you would be a criminal for even suggesting it for things it was widely used 20 years ago.

[simen]

As far as I'm aware therapy and antidepressants are equally effective, in the studies that have actually compared them such as this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3683266/ However that is only true in aggregate and obviously not necessarily true of any given individual.

I'm really reluctant to get into any further discussion though because it seems like you're arguing against things I never said, and bringing up irrelevant, but extremely invasive and side-effect prone procedures like hemispherectomy as if that proves that data about antidepressants is bunk, which is just a complete non sequitur. It would be like bringing up bloodletting or lobotomy as if that proves that the data about modern vaccines NOT causing autism is bunk. Just a complete logical disconnect.