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.