No one has any business claiming that antidepressants or lithium can magically prevent misfortune, or sorrow. No one has any business saying that they make one immune to all grief. But my (admittedly amateur) observation of those who have been prescribed (by a competent, experienced physician) seratonin re-uptake inhibitors for depression, is that they give the patient a better grip on himself, giving him a fighting chance to prevent himself from getting caught in a sort of feedback loop in which the sorrow itself (not the original pain) creates more and more sorrow. I have also known someone with manic-depression, whose condition appeared to me to have been stabilized by the drug-treatments appropriate to that condition.

T.