I had pretty severe depression in my teens, attributed to moving halfway across the country to a new town and having to "start all over". Antidepressants were forced on me as a teenager. I think it's for that reason, I saw worsening rather than improvement.
I self medicated with alcohol, marijuana and occasionally other stuff and that certainly got me through the hard times but it didn't help my regimen or productivity level. I became severely addicted to marijuana by the time I was nineteen, being on disability with nothing better to do. Finally, there came some hope. By this time I was off all medications, but still severely mentally ill. I reached out for psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms which helped me quit alcohol and marijuana. They had a greater sort of efficacy so I was able to not abuse these things any more in a way I felt content with.
As the years went by, doctors kept insisting a mood stabilizer for my depression and mania would be the best choice, but I knew the stuff they were prescribing was crap. I eventually saw their point of view and humored them for a while but the mood stabilizers ended up doing way more physical harm than good. Like Lithium toxicity. Now I'm moving off a mood stabilizer because my mood doesn't fluctuate anymore if I don't want it to. I've managed to work well without it. I guess I attribute that ability to being more conscious of what's going on.
I would say of all the medications I've tried, there are very few that contributed to any level of helping my mental health. I think it was more in the combination of being in a peaceful environment, surrounded by loving people and slowly taking on the responsibility of dealing with my illness as much on my own as humanly possible that really contributed to my health and growth. I have a severely debilitating illness so, considering I can manage so much on my own that most people with my illness seriously lose their shit over has allowed me to look over the years of growth, at least, and assess how far I've come.
