Years ago, following my mother’s suicide, one of the doctors I was seeing tried several different types of antidepressants to help me cope.
But, my system tends to react to side effects of quite a lot of different medications very badly.
The extreme dry mouth was bad enough but when I began missing door handles by six inches and tripping over my own feet, I decided that could make driving rather dangerous and stopped taking anything.
Looking back on it now, I think everyone else was more concerned than I was about the possibility of suicide for me.
So, I just had to muddle through somehow. And now I’ve read that in studies they’ve done that talk therapy and antidepressants are about equally effective for most people.
I was very fortunate to have an excellent rapport with a shrink who really really knew what he was doing. That can be very difficult to find , so I was lucky.
So, even tho these meds had too many side effects to be workable for me personally, I’m a pragmatist. If it’s working for someone and improving the quality of their life, I think that’s terrific.
One of my best friends from college is severely bi polar (clearly inherited from his father since two out of his three other siblings share the same diagnosis) and these meds have so much improved the quality of life for him as well as his family. So I’ve seen firsthand how restoring proper brain chemistry affects ones life in a very positive way.
So, I’m clearly in the mindset of “If it works, don’t knock it.”