What you're talking about is taking penicillin when you've got an infection. That is a finite, physical problem that is easy to diagnose and repair. That's fine..... as far as it goes. Now, arragonder, I'm going to use some grown-up words, so try hard to keep up.arragonder said:
What the REST of us are talking about is this:
Depression is the mental equivalent of having your legs chopped off. You feel like half a person, like you are BROKEN and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it. You see people all around you who are happy and whole but that only reinforces how INCOMPLETE you feel. After all, they managed to be happy, and they're not exactly perfect, so there must be something terribly, TERRIBLY wrong with YOU. You feel like this all the time. You can't help it. You can't just wish it away, any more than a legless person can wish their limbs back. Depression cannot be simply "cured" by a pill, or a swift kick in the ass, or any other quick and easy remedy you might devise. This is because of three things.
First, mental states and their causes are intangible abstracts which exist only inside our heads. We're not even entirely sure what thoughts or emotions ARE. This means we cannot affect them with the precision or accuracy we normally like to have in science.
Second, psychopharmacology -- real, USEFUL psychopharmacology -- is only fifty years old. That might sound like a long time to you but much of it is still experimental. Any study of thoughts or emotions is hampered by the subjects' inability accurately to describe their feelings, by the ingrained biases and opinions of the researchers, and by the limited (though large) number of chemicals which can be safely applied to the body and brain.
Third, the brain is UNIMAGINABLY complicated. Imagine the brain as a series of connected roads, FAR larger and more complex than all the roads in the world put together. Now imagine you have to deliver a package to an address somewhere on one of those roads. Now imagine half the roads are one-way. Only 10% of the roads have signs. Now imagine for every wrong turn you make, catastrophic damage will occur -- a tunnel collapsing, a 100-car pileup, whatever. You begin to see the impossibility of "curing" a mental state with the simple application of pills.
What this all means is pills designed to change your emotions must be VERY carefully concocted and administered and EVEN THEN they come with a host of problems. They use some potentially very complex chemicals which inevitably have potentially dubious effects. Often they do not FIX the problem, they merely let you TRADE your problem for a NEW problem you MAY OR MAY NOT find less annoying than the original problem. For example, a friend of mine can't drive cars or take tae kwon do anymore because he's on medicine which, as a side effect, whacks out his balance and coordination. I am not making this up. He takes antipsychotics to trade uncontrollable episodes of hostility (a problem) for having to give up cars, martial arts, and other things (a different problem).
Now, to return to the legs-chopped-off analogy: People without legs can use wheelchairs in the hope of experiencing a reasonable quality of life, but anyone in a wheelchair can tell you there are long, long lists of things regular folks take for granted which the wheelchair-bound simply cannot ever do. Many of the "normal" things that *can* be done from a wheelchair take so much longer or are so awkward that it might be better not to try. The wheelchair isn't a cure for the problem, it's just the best we can do. Antidepressants are the same thing: They don't make you better, they just let you roll along as best you can. The choice to take them is neither obvious nor ideal.
