Antidepressants to treat grief? Psychiatry panelists with ties to drug industry say yes

[AndSheGoesDown]

122. Psychiatric meds shouldn't be taken lightly

I had panic attacks and have suffered from depression to different degrees for quite a while (now it's mild, thankfully.). I'm young and was perfectly healthy and I had so many dangerous side effects to so many psychiatric pills I was forced to stop taking them for my health. The last one was a pill they gave me for hypomania (short and technical for "i'm crazy as fuck and cannot stop moving&quot ... No, I'm not bipolar. It was a side effect from an antidepressant (others gave me tachichardia and high blood pressure immediately), and after a year of taking it I was a serious danger to myself and maybe others. So they gave me this pill.. 3 days later I was in hospital from severe allergy (erythema multiforme), covered in a brownish purple rash. It's been 2.5 years and I still have allergies I didn't have before. I was allergic to the sun for one year. I gained 20kg from the allergy meds. I'm allergic to grass and a bunch of other things I was never allergic to before... Last spring it was so bad I had to quit University for a semester, because it gave me unbearable stomach problems on top of breathing issues and a rash and I couldn't concentrate at all and felt sick and weak. On top of that, all of this incident is on my medical record, and when they see this pill on it they assume I'm bipolar; most doctors don't take me seriously whenever I have a health issue. I haven't taken psychiatric meds in over 2 years now and I've been way better without them, went back to Uni, moved by myself, got a boyfriend and a dog. All things I couldn't have done on antidepressants.

All of this unfortunately true and ongoing story is just to illustrate the issue: People with mental illness can be better with pills, yes. They might make you happier, yes. But they have so many side effects (that are a lot more common than they admit, since psychiatrists sometimes blame the fact you were ill to start with for your new symptoms) that they should be limited to people who really need them. And there's also the fact they don't know how most of these pills work on a chemical level (yes, serotonin inhibitors, what does serotonin do? how do you prove someone has a serotonin deficiency? "oh we think that...&quot or what kind of issues they might bring until after they're out in the market for a while and they're forced to putting a black label. The amount of people who get hypomania, kill themselves and even commit crimes because of SSRIs is insane. Not everyone does, of course, and a select few actually get better from these meds but is it worth it? There should either be lots of information readily available for patients (which there isn't), or strong regulations on who can take them. It's like giving chemo to cancer patients without warning them of the weakness it causes or the loss of hair... Except chemo actually works a lot more than psychiatric meds in the case of depression (some work just as much as placebo does), and we know its mechanism.