Okay, this might sound like I'm criticising people who are happy with their medications and I don't mean that.

I'm in favor of using medication with patients who are in a crisis. Sometimes that's the only thing that keeps them alive long enough for other kinds of therapy to have time to start working, but I'm also leery of the side effects that some antidepressants have. I suppose I would be much more apt to say, go ahead and medicate! if I were sure that each person who was being "diagnosed" with depression had received a thorough physical, and any underlying problems were being addressed.

You see, I'm not a big believer in the DSM. That's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which is the "bible" of the psychiatric profession. It describes depression as a syndrome, when I think, on many occasions, depression is a symptom. Lead poisoning, infections, and other kinds of trauma can put the body and mind out of balance, and send serotonin levels down to the cellar. And no matter how much anti-depression medication and therapy someone gets for their depression, if the cause of the depression is an old typhus infection, then they're only going to be cured by the _right_ medication. In this case, antibiotics.

There's a book by Sydney Walker, called "A Dose of Sanity" which is pretty good about talking about the issue. He's got a soapbox, of course, so read opposing viewpoints as well, but I think his arguments are clear.

BTW, so you have some background on this, my uncle killed himself when I was a baby, and his son (who had found the body) killed himself just a couple of years ago. In my uncle's case, he was taking a 'shoebox' full of drugs -- and my cousin had been fighting depression, with medications, for years. My father, who claimed to be manic-depressive in a mild sort of way, had a lot of physical problems too, and in the years before he died, he used to read up and catch all of the drug interaction problems for his own shoebox full of drugs long before any of his doctors did. Which is why I still check the PDR before taking any new prescriptions.