Medicine

A friend of mine shared a write-up about “surviving antidepressants” today with the intention of providing suggestions on how to deal with depression and anxiety following the political shifts we are experiencing right now. I clicked it curiously and was horrified by what I read. The writers story sounded extremely frustrating, with a bad experience with one antidepressant and one doctor, and I feel their pain for that. However, their conclusions made me furious.

Being treated for mental illness with medicines is not as easy as, say, being treated for an infection with an antibiotic. There’s an amazing and somewhat horrifying amount of guesswork involved. There’s no blood test for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or the slew of other things that effect a broad swath of humanity (yet). There’s no way to measure what exactly is lacking, or overdone, or exactly what needs adjusted, to bring someone back towards the mean.