These aren't drugs you can just ask for (in the UK) at least and the parent wasn't "pimping". Undermining someone's account of their positive experience using therapeutic drugs because of your own bias shows an astounding lack of compassion..
Getting help, help that often involves therapeutic drugs to bootstrap other life changes _is_ taking responsibility.
Your comment neatly sums up the toxic attitude of "I don't understand it so it must be bad".
Put your ego aside and listen to people living with seriously debilitating neurological issues that you fortunately do not.
Breaking cycles or bootstrapping changes for those too overwhelmed with depression or anxiety to make lige changes are the ideal uses for the drugs. And then you are supposed to get weaned off them until the next spiral, and then ise rhem to shorten that one too. But in the US plenty of doctors seem to treat simply asking for these drugs as the requisite symptoms for diagnosis. Andany people I care about were diagnosed with chronic depression or anxiety as early teens when all sorts of things are happening. Decades later they still take them and who can say now if they ever needed them, but they certainly do now. It is the normal state for their brains and any attempt to wean would require those complex feedback loops to rebalance.
Continuous use isn't always bad either, but im the US we don't always try other options first, and if the mess work they almost never encourage you to stop, because if you hurt yourself that is a liability for them, but if you are a robot with no strong feelings about anything that eats cake, watches circuses and goes to work, then at least that is something.
On the contrary - there is now much evidence these drugs do not work as effectively as the glowing reviews state. There is also much evidence that they are being over-prescribed, for profit.
So it is just as toxic to say "these drugs are awesome and you should try them in spite of all of this talk about them being ineffective, addictive, and being sold for massive profit" in that context.
I believe I was quite careful in what I said rather than pimping antidepressants.
Each time I start a course of antidepressants, I am genuinely worried what the outcome will be. Messing with your brain chemistry isn't something to do lightly. But equally, for many people, possibly including myself, it quite literally saves their life.
However, I must take umbrage at your characterisation of how considering a course of these drugs is akin to taking on a lifetime addiction.
They do cause withdrawal/discontinuation effects if you stop suddenly, and often tapering isn't particularly pleasant either. This is something that users of these drugs have known for a long time, likely since they first hit the market, but it took a surprisingly long time for the medical industry to accept this and list it on patient information leaflets.
I also certainly accept that many doctors are quite terrible at discussing potential side effects and discontinuation syndrome with patients. This doesn't just concern antidepressants or even heavily marketed drugs. Common, generic, 50+ year old antibiotics can have really horrific side effects that aren't often mentioned by your doctor. This is a serious informed consent issue that needs addressing more widely within the medical field.
However, these drugs are not heroin. They are, for most people, relatively easy (albeit sometimes unpleasant) to taper. They don't cause the same kind of pleasure/punishment cycle that makes substances like cocaine or heroin so hard to quit. You don't become a fiend when you miss a dose, you just feel shitty and get some brain zaps. Nobody's holding up gas stations to get some dollars to pay for their Prozac. If you do discontinue antidepressants, your life is typically better for having taken them compared to when you started, and for the most part, you can take these drugs for your entire life without significant adverse consequences.
These drugs ruin lives just as efficiently as they 'improve' them.
Be very, very careful if you are going to advise people that they should overlook the evidence of this fact, "because they're great for me so you should try them too!".
It's very rare that these drugs ruin someone's life. For the most part, if they don't work for you, you just stop taking them and try something else instead without any long term side consequences.
There is the very well known risk of suicide in adolescents in particular, which is printed in a black box warning on all of these drugs. This potential side effect usually very early on in the treatment, and usually occurs in people who already had suicidal tendencies. Discontinuing the drug immediately typically resolves this. Responsible doctors will weigh up this risk and ensure that everything is done to make this less likely.
Other things are like sexual side effects can persist for some time after discontinuation, but nearly always resolve eventually. Serotonin syndrome is another risk but the chance of that is fairly low unless you take other serotonin-affecting drugs.
Should these risks be weighed up when considering treatment? Absolutely. Does that make the drugs harmful overall? Absolutely not. Look at some of the people who've experienced permanent nerve damage as a result of quinolone antibiotics - yet they are still on the market because sometimes there is no alternative besides death.
>It's very rare that these drugs ruin someone's life.
I don't agree, I think its just under-reported/under-studied, because it clearly won't make anyone any money to do so ..
For-profit mental health should be illegal, or at least treated the same as religion - do it if you want, but don't force your ideologies on others who don't agree with you ..
I think this nonsense deserves some psychoanalysis of itself, as well as acknowledging that brain chemistry does matter for various sorts of mental illness.
One is designed to get you high so you can deal with your life in a "socially acceptable manner" - the other one helps blood sugar enter the body's cells so it can be used for energy. One is a social crutch - the other, vital medicine.
Its not wrong, it is factually correct. Mind-altering substances get you high... these pharmaceuticals are merely socially-acceptable high-producing mind-altering substances where - guess what - the science is not final on what they are doing to human beings.
So is the conclusion that these drugs are worth the side effects, expense, and significant addiction - just because someone on the Internet had a good time on them.
"normal" or "good", either way you become a "culturally acceptable" drug addict who must purchase a prescription for a drug made specifically for the purpose of creating a market of addicts.
Well yeah it's "culturally acceptable" because of they low abuse potential, which is to say there are real actual differences that go into making it culturally acceptable. No one is crushing up their SSRIs and snorting them and going in to sex work to pay for the habit the same way heroin users do, because, well it's not a drug addiction as recognized by the psychiatric industry.
The same people reaping massive profits are telling you whether or not you should think of these drugs as 'normal' or not.
Nothing is normal about a lifetime addiction - whether the high you get is a party high, or a "I am feeling normal, where normal has been defined for me by a high priest who actually happens to also be my pimp" ..
