Antidepresants

I dont know if it is just me but i find it wrong that we live in a society that makes a large percentage of its people so depressed that they can no longer function properly in that society. then gives them drugs so they no longer feel depressed. what use is it treating the symptoms if the cause is left to fester.

i was personally put on them a few years back and i took them for a few months before i refused to take them any longer. yes they made me feel less depressed. but then they made me feel less everything. even depression is better than feeling nexto nothing. now dont get me wrong. i have no problem with real drugs(illegal ones) and have taking my fair share over the years. but atleast with them the mood change is only for a few hours and i still have to come back and deal with my problems the next morning. while people who get on antidepresants usually stay on them for years or forever. and yes i know alot of people get addicted to illlegal drugs because they are trying to hide from there problems. but are they truly any worse than people who use antidepresants to hide from there problems.

and i know there are people with real physiological problems with there brains like bipolar but that is a different story entirely

so i was just wondering what are your peoples views on them and there rising use in society. what do you think the major problems are that are making so many people depressed from all walks of life and is there any other solution besides permantly putting people on drugs to solve the problem

Real problems like bipolar... as if.
I'm not going to list off the things I've been diagnosed with over the years, but I will say bipolar is one of them. Abilify is the medication I was prescribed. I have meds for depression too, the most recent one I picked up is Zoloft.
Abilify makes me feel terrible. Zoloft does what you described.. it does what any antidepressant does. Let's say your emotions go up and down often. An antidepressant cuts off the downs.......... as well as the ups! So you're living in a world of middles, a world of feeling "ok" ALL THE TIME. It's not really living. It sucks.

Why drugs prescribed to treat disorders are acceptable: they are designed to enable "disorderly people" to function safely in society. Whether its the person's own safety, the safety of others - I don't know. Both I guess.

They do the opposite of what most real drugs do (illegal drugs). Illegal drugs *big generalization here* make people eccentric and disruptive to the natural order of things.

Having a disorder is much like being on 'real drugs'!
Unacceptable.

What I think is if you're really depressed and you are sure you're gonna continue taking them then it's fine but otherwise it only makes it worse. Antidepressents have many physical and emotional sideffects and they make the person taking them worse,because they don't cure depression they only ease the pain and that keeps all the depression repressed, and so it keeps on building up and when you finally think you're ok and get yourself off the meds you go worse than you were. So, I think that people shouldn't take medication unless nothing else works because once you're on them you can't go off them easily.

All I really know is what I have seen from people close to me. My mother used to take Zoloft too, after she and my father divorced. That was the year that us kids basically ran over her. We got away with anything because she just didn't care, everything was "fine." After she met my stepdad she got off the Zoloft and hasn't taken it since. I suppose anti-depressants are a substitute until you find a real drug to fix your depression. For my mom, it was someone to love who would love her back.

You gotta find that innnnerr peeeeeeaaaaheheeace...Yeah..

I feel like busting out into song.

I bet in a few years we're going to have a pill for everything.

My mom uses anitdepressants and I'm not sure if it exactly works or not. I feel like she's the same with or without the drug. I don't think a pill can solve anyone's problems. It might temporarily but I think at the end of the day, it's all up to that person to solve it on their own. It's all psychological. When a patient receives a placebo sometimes it works for them because they believe it'll cure them. It's all in the mind, I think if the patient doesn't have faith in the drug then it won't work for them.

In the old days, when people had psychological problems they had no idea what to do with them so they just sent them to an asylum. Nowadays, we just hand them a pill and hope it works for them.

"In the old days, when people had psychological problems they had no idea what to do with them so they just sent them to an asylum. Nowadays, we just hand them a pill and hope it works for them."

This had me cracking up. I don't think there were people going to asylums for depression, bipolar, OCD, ADD, or even ADHD. There are so many pill popping psychological problems that don't make you crazy enough to be asylum-worthy. In the old days, a depressed person was depressed... they wrote poetry. A bipolar person had an unpredictable temperament, so their friends walked on eggshells. A person with OCD was a maid! They cleaned and they obsessed over silly things. Someone with ADD was... the same as everyone else in the world. We all space out and have trouble concentrating sometimes. And someone with ADHD was a lot of fun and sometimes wouldn't shut up.

The end.

Anti- Depressants? Well i use to take those and trust mee they work wonders!. I think its okay to take them i mean it makes you feel "happy" and thats so much better than feeling sad and depress. Do you really want to feel sad when you can feel HAPPY? but recently now people abuse them and get addicted so i think that its all about what you want.

Braidhair. i have people give me the same answer when i asked them why they take heroin or xtc. also i agree with jarred, from my short experience with them. it is easy to confuse feeling happy with just no longer feeling depressed. but it is not hapiness in the end. it is just the lack of depression. i also believe there is a reason for depression. it tells us there is something wrong in our lifes that need to be changed. not ignored in the hope it would go away. to give an analogy. can you imagine suffering pain because theres a knife in your leg, and your doctor then gives you pain killers so you no longer feel the knife in your leg. i mean seriously

I've never taken anti-depressants and I never really plan to but from what you're saying, I don't think illegal drugs are really any better then. If you think about it, people only don't stay on illegal drugs because of the cost or maybe from getting caught?

I think like any drug when abused they aren't "good" but I doubt that would stop anyone in society. I've abused prescription drugs, everything. I think I just find swallowing them a whole lot of fun. :/

And the problem is likely stress and the amount of pressure put onto individuals in the present society. And to solve the problem is better psychiatrists, or rather getting rid of the stress. Pulling those naked females off the billboards, covering the abs of the muscular men, and getting over the nerds, the preps and the emo cliques.