Anti-Depressants

Joanna Sheldon cjs10 at cornell.edu
Sun Aug 27 22:39:24 PDT 2000


Carrol,


>Anti-Depressants DO NOT HELP GRIEF. Sometimes grief can *trigger*, perhaps
even
>cause the onset of, depression, and then anti-depressants can help. But
they are
>*NO HELP AT ALL* for "depression" caused by depressing events.
>
<...>
>
>Unless your sister suffered from a mental illness and *not* simply grief,
she did
>not suffer from Depression. And it is stupid to take a medication for an
illness
>if you don't have the illness.

Makes sense to me. I've always thought it was monstrous that she was offered a drug to control a perfectly healthy response on her part to the the event of a dear friend's death. Fact is, she had to take two weeks off from work to let herself fall apart a little over this thing, but two weeks is all she was alotted by her employer for falling apart, so when the back-to-work deadline loomed she was driven to accept the advice of an irresponsible and/or idiotic pill-pusher.


>Before I go on, one thing you say above is as stupid, and I mean really
stupid, as
>it would be to say that we ought to admit that below zero weather causes
us to
>feel cold. You say, "Perhaps we should admit we don't know everything
there is to
>know about anti-depressants." This makes me want to scream. I have never read
>anything about anti-depressants by anyone who knows anything that did not say
>this. "Perhaps" -- SHIT. "Admit" -- SHIT. "don't know everything" -- SHIT. We
>*know* (no perhaps about it), we *claim* not admit, we take for granted, not
>admit, that we know very little about anti-depressants. That's what most
>psychiatrists tell their patients. For you to write a silly sentence like
this is
>to broadcast to the heavens that you know nothing at all about
anti-depressants.

You're sounding really goofy here, man. My purported tentativeness was meant sarcastically. And if you've "never read anything about anti-depressants by anyone who knows anything that did not say this", then I guess, uh -- well, gee, Carrol, I'm in purty good company.

Thanks for the mini-diss on anti-depressants.

cheers, Jo

www.overlookhouse.com



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