Suicide Risk for Paxil

Well then.

Death certainly alleviates depression for us unbelievers. Thank the almighty some of these big moneymakers for drug companies, with all kinds of dangerous side effects "antidepressants" actually work, even if their mechanism of action is not quite what we expected.

I have a question.
Do such drugs alleviate depression in adults or anyone else?

I have an answer.
No, not usually.

I have theory about it too.
Most depression has nothing to do with brain chemistry and everything to do with experience. A pill or 5 million can't change experience.

The reason more mature swallowers of the false fix of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors do not commit suicide - or commit murder like some youngsters who take them do - is because most adults have had more practice at controlling impulsiveness, so are better at it.

These drugs disconnect people from feeling, make them numb, but with periodic flashes of intense, out of context emotion, much of it manifesting as aggressive impulse. That isn't really treatment for depression, now is it?

The inability to connect to other people can be useful at times, though in a daunting display of irony, may be the trigger for much depression.

I've personally found it necessary to cultivate this disconnection trait in myself, though it doesn't come naturally to me, for limited use in extraordinary circumstances.
So perhaps in some brief, pain drenched passages of emotional life, chemically induced numbness is a good holding place, a place to wait it out, but only a holding place.
You wouldn't want to take up permanent residence there.Because such a drug is residence in a dimly lit, corridor of numbness. There's little to see and the directions you can go are limited.
As long as a drug flows through your body it removes choice.
Of course, depression can be the same limiting, narrow state, but assaulting the depression through chemicals rather than self exploration stems from a badly distorted understanding of reality.

SSRIs were developed as weight loss drugs. When they didn't work for that, except at extraordinarily high doses, they were released to the public as antidepressants.

I believe the first one marketed was Prozac, followed shortly by Zoloft, Paxil, then others.
These drugs have made millions of dollars, maybe billions for big pharma, a 666 kind of operation if ever there was one.
Given what we know about drug companies, we have to assume some research about these drugs could have been hidden.
And the testing we do know about was horribly inadequate. I no longer remember the numbers, though I read extensively about this a few years back, but these drugs were tested on a very few people and subjected to less than rigorous scrutiny.

The side effects from these drugs are so pervasive it is not accurate to call them side effects. One must call them "drug effects" to be real about it, because everyone experiences them, though not everyone notices to the same degree.

Most people notice the sexual dysfunction they cause though.

It is very sad, how we operate. We are a people deeply removed from context and lacking in capacity to feel connection and make connections.

We treat our depression with drugs instead of examining our lives and feeling and acting upon our feelings.

We pretend our national problems, our poverty and crime,etc., don't have a social origin, and all fixes come from up-by-the-spiritual-bootstraps salvation in Jesus, so we can justify wiping out social welfare programs, as Bush is doing, in some kind of crazy Calvinist hate frenzy of denial and self destruction.

Background is removed from our corporate news stories, so much so that red state Amerikkka believed secular Saddam was getting it on with Islamic Jihad, and Israel is the victim of the Palestinians and peak oil is a new idea and fat can be removed from one's body with drugs and surgery as successfully and healthily as it can be removed through movement and healthy diet.

We don't look at the whole. We look at the parts. Which is why so many prescriptions for dangerous drugs are written.

I've spent my adult life struggling to see the whole. I'm probably not as successful as I should be in seeing the world this way, but I try. I'm probably not very good at it, but it is a primary goal for me - see the whole, grasp the truth - which makes me very unlikely to take any antidepressants drugs.