Antidepressants

[pozorvlak]

I've been on the antidepressant fluoxetine (better known as Prozac) for nearly a year now, and I thought I'd write about what it's been like. I've heard a lot of scaremongering about how awful antidepressants are and how they don't actually work and they all have terrible side effects ranging from permanent impotence to a constant emotional

Comments

[andrewducker]

All of that is good. Glad you're getting out more and involving yourself in the world.

In my experience CBT is awesome if your problems are largely down to negative feedback loops, whereby you think that you're worthless, and therefore interpret everything badly, and therefore cause yourself distress, and therefore think you're worthless. Breaking that cycle is incredibly useful, and simply changing your actions so that you move away from that attraction point into a different stable pattern is great.

If, however, your problem is down to something more deep rooted, then sometimes that needs to be dealt with. If you have unpleasant emotional tangles/baggage, PTSD (childhood or adult related), or one of a variety of personality disorders, then working with a good specialist who can help you unpick what you can, find good strategies for dealing with what you can't, and help you work things through, can be incredibly useful.

Oh, and to be thorough, there are some things that are chemical/genetic in nature, where you can't fix it through any kind of emotional/psychological intervention, and you're going to need to take drugs, or some other physical intervention, at least some of the time, in order to cope better. I have friends with SAD, for instance, and there's not much they can do about that apart from learn to recognise it kicking in, and make sure they spend lots of time with bright light.

Working out what proportions of your depression are down to each of these three factors, and therefore which approach is best suited to helping you, is up to you, of course :->

(I spent a year and a half working through option 2, untangling all sorts of unpleasant baggage that had tied me in knots. Well worth the money I spent on it. And it doesn't have to be that expensive if you can find a decent place that bases their fees on income.)

[pozorvlak]

I don't *think* I have any trauma deeper than "did a PhD in a subject I thought I was good at, got badly stuck for 2.5 years, then got a succession of jobs for which I wasn't qualified". Though given what figg says below about social situations, I'm wondering if I'm further along the autistic spectrum than I'd realised.

Sorry to hear that you've suffered from this awful disease, but I'm glad to hear you're doing better these days!