I agree with you, LindaLou, on a lot of your points. Mental illness is one of the few conditions that can't be "proven" the way heart disease or cancer can. For instance, if you were to take xrays of someone with heart disease and show them to doctors from all over the world, all would be able to pinpoint where the problem was and tell that the heart was diseased. With things like depression and other psychiatric conditions, all that can really be done is to make a diagnosis off of symptoms and outward appearance of the patient, which leaves questions about the true cause of the symptoms. I am in no way a proponent of psychiatric medications and don't feel that they helped me personally, but I just didn't want to be responsible for telling someone with severe, disabling depression or other problems to quit without knowing what to expect or how to counter the effects. The fact that most antidepressants performed equal to or WORSE than placebos in clinical trials (Prozac) is important to keep in mind before starting these drugs, as are the horrid discontinuation symptoms, side effects, and unknown effects of the drugs. It's best to never start them in the first place, but for someone on them as long as the originator of this thread, it can actually be physically dangerous to quit unless done properly. I also agree that symptoms of many mental illnesses are there to serve as warnings that things aren't right in our lives, but there are genuine cases of severe, genetically-linked disorders like schizophrenia, where the environment is NOT the cause.

The fact remains that for a select few who failed to improve using other interventions and are unable to function in life outside of an asylum, medication is the only thing with noticeable effects. For about 98.9% of those on meds, that's not the case. They should be a last ditch effort to try only when the potential benefits outweigh the risks and when everything else has failed. Nutritional approaches, biomedical therapies, psychotherapy, changes in physical environment, and healthier living practices are usually sufficient when undertaken in the correct manner for the appropriate length of time.

I wouldn't recommend prescription drugs to ANYONE I know or have met online, as their conditions don't appear grave enough to go down that road. In fact, I've never met a person I think was so severely impaired that I would tell them to start taking these drugs...I only wish physicians and psychiatrists felt the same way. My experience with these chemicals is that I noticed an improvement in the first month, and then nothing but apathy and lack of creativity thereafter. Quitting was absolute HELL each time, whether I'd taken the drug for 6 weeks or 2 years, and many people have reported the same thing. Never again. I've come to realize that depression isn't a normal state of being and that there is a cause behind such unnatural conditions, which is the reason I joined this forum. Heavy metal intoxication can DEFINITELY mess with your mind in about any way imaginable, something I discovered from hours of internet research. Psychiatric drugs only mask these symptoms (unless they don't work at all or make it worse), and that's worthless in my book. I will forever be bitter toward the doctors who started me--a 16 year old high school student--on these drugs (Risperdal, Luvox, and Anafranil) all at once and gave me a drug called Cogentin, which they said was to prevent "side effects", which I later learned meant "Tardive Dyskinesia", the irreversible movement disorder similar to Parkinson's or Tourette's (Cogentin is marketed as a Parkinson's drug, actually.) Anyway, it was all downhill from there, with me trying about 9 other drugs, some of which gave me seizures and violent outbursts upon quitting. The best advice is to never start, but for those wishing to quit, the best advice I have is to do the research, consult a doctor you trust to monitor your condition (most don't approve of quitting these meds), and taking precautions to avoid stressful sitiuations until withdrawal is complete.