[exolymph]

> Medication do not solve the root of the pain.

Contradictory anecdata: Therapy never helped me until after I started taking venlafaxine (generic Effexor) which took away my anhedonia and made it possible to process my trauma productively, rather than continuing to wallow in misery and dysfunction.

[copperx]

Another Effexor success story here. After spending most of my life suffering through mood changes for no reason (e.g., sometimes I got sad after seeing a color, or the way that something was arranged -- I've called this "emotional synesthesia"), Effexor has made me a normal person again. I've been taking the lowest dose for 7 years now, with no side effects besides dulling of emotions (interestingly, it makes decision making hard -- for me, it now requires me to write a pro/con list when facing a decision because there are few emotions involved, even when buying something that should be slightly exciting, like a new car). As someone who had a great childhood and no major traumas, it makes me wonder if I'm one of the people who have a legitimate "chemical imbalance".

[iamnothere]

> (interestingly, it makes decision making hard -- for me, it now requires me to write a pro/con list when facing a decision because there are few emotions involved, even when buying something that should be slightly exciting, like a new car)

This is actually a known phenomenon! Emotions are key to the decision-making process, and when they are impaired for whatever reason then you are more likely to make suboptimal decisions. I recommend Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error for a good picture of how this works.

[copperx]

Thanks for the book suggestion. I'm now wondering whether an overactive emotion circuitry makes one an even better decision maker or does it impair it? Perhaps the book will provide some insight.

[arkades]

This, btw, is the standard perspective on medication in the psychiatric community. It's uncommonly the answer in itself, but it puts the person neuropsychiatric state in a mode that is amenable to improvement.

The data tend to support that medication + therapy is significantly better than either alone for mood disorders, which is what gives rise to that conclusion. Spend a week on an inpatient ward with really sick people that were failing on outpatient therapy and meds, and see how quickly they improve in therapy once their meds are appropriately modified. Or look at folks with something like bipolar disorder, where only medication (and only a subset of that) has been shown to decrease the (upsettingly high) rate of completed suicide.

The OP video's assertion that medication is useless is baffling to me; I can only assume that they spent their career with reasonably functional personality/mood disorders in a primarily outpatient setting. Which is another way of saying, if you only ever see the common cold, of course you'd think IV antibiotics are useless overkill.