> Doctors mostly advertise it as a tool to help get a leg up in overcoming depression with the idea being that it helps you get your shit together and somehow become not depressed. But when you actually get diagnosed, they just prescribe an SSRI and move on. If you ask what you're meant to do, they'll recommend therapy if you're lucky.
SSRI's are completely unrelated to getting your shit together except for the fact they make you less depressed which makes it easier to get your shit together. Doctor's talk about it the way you mentioned to feed into American moralization about drugs. But truth of it is we don't really know how they work(we have a couple of tenuous guesses), we just know they reduce depression and relapse risk.
>And then we come to posts like this and comments like here, about people who have become dependent on SSRI just to have the same quality of life as they did before ever touching it. But now they have to go through hell to get off it.
We don't necessarily know what their life would be like if they hadn't taken the SSRI's. Judging from the studies they'd be marginally less happy, have a greater risk of relapsing, and an increased sex drive.
SSRI's are completely unrelated to getting your shit together except for the fact they make you less depressed which makes it easier to get your shit together. Doctor's talk about it the way you mentioned to feed into American moralization about drugs. But truth of it is we don't really know how they work(we have a couple of tenuous guesses), we just know they reduce depression and relapse risk.
>And then we come to posts like this and comments like here, about people who have become dependent on SSRI just to have the same quality of life as they did before ever touching it. But now they have to go through hell to get off it.
We don't necessarily know what their life would be like if they hadn't taken the SSRI's. Judging from the studies they'd be marginally less happy, have a greater risk of relapsing, and an increased sex drive.