I respect your opinion, but what about those who are forced to take anti-depressants against their own will and then become dependent? I was hospitalized for anorexia when I was only 12 and was given anti-depressants through the IV that they hooked me up to. After my release, I had no knowledge of pharmaceuticals. I just knew that my parents would get mad if I didn't take my paxil and it helped me stop crying all the time. It seemed to work for awhile, I was emotionally numb and socially pretty clueless, but I got by until I was 17 and all hell broke loose. I won't go into the details, but I realized that paxil was just making me stupid and indifferent to important events that could occur in my life. Even though I tapered I had really, really bad withdrawals (probably because I had been on it so long.) My pdoc's solution was to put me on wellbutrin which was a brilliant. I acted like I had borderline personality disorder and tried to kill myself numerous times. My parents eventually took me to a mental hospital and now I take an AD along with an amphetamine and benzo. It works except when it doesn't.
Always happy to politely discuss differences in views
I'm a little confused with your question however. What exactly are you asking?
I would argue that it is wrong to force someone to take drugs against their will, except in severe circumstances, such as someone experiencing a psychotic break which requires antipsychotics
(temporarily), or perhaps giving someone narcan when they intentionally overdosed attempting suicide
(That ones a little more complex, and don't feel like getting into it, just trying to give examples)
I think that giving children drugs such as SSRI's, SNRI's, and SNRE's is extremely bad medicine. Not only do they not have a choice, but it could potentially alter their brain chemistry, personality, and experience of life.
I would also go so far to say that either one or both of these scenarios is true. 1) The current generation of parents are not equiped to be parents, and are not able to handle raising a child. When things get difficult, instead of actually being a parent, and learning from those experiences, as was the situation when I grew up, they instead look for a pill. Granted they could look for a pill because they are truly concerned about the well being of their children, however, I would argue that some parents seek out a pill as a way to make their "job" of being a parent easier. I believe the latter is paradoxical as I feel parents should not only have to, but want to, experience the growing pains of their children, it's an essential part of raising a family.
2)Where there may be situations where parents seek the easy way out, there are likewise situations where parents, without any ill intentions, blindly follow Dr's orders. From the ad's seen on television, to a diagnosis of ADHD because your child doesn't want to do his math homework, we've entered into a society that seeks to medicate everything. Dr's have changed from the once caring protectors of life they were generations ago, and has essentially become licensed drug dealers, pushing the next best drug onto their customers, I mean patients......
Unfortunately it seems that you've suffered at the hands of the medical community. Life was once meant to be vibrant and diverse, and it's slowly becoming dull and melancholy.
I am sorry to inform everyone this, but life SUCKS. Bottom line, no matter what you do, you are all going to die. No amount of money, sex, happiness, anything will prevent that from happening, one day you will die. Since we currently don't know what happens after death, we must assume that there is nothing, that life ultimately sucks, and we are all doomed to the same fate.
If that is true, is there any purpose to life? I would argue yes. In our life we have something great, something that is so special that despite the fact that we are ultimately going to die, we need to cherish it for the time we are given the privilege to have it.....it is humanity....it is emotions.
We are slowly moving towards a world that seeks to strip people of the very thing that makes them human, emotions are no longer seen as a tool, a lesson, an unexplainable feeling of butterflies or fear, emoions have become the plague of people.
For whatever the reason, I believe that society has developed AID's of the emotions, the immune system is failing. Someone might have a bad day, get a divorce, or it might just be raining out, and instead of being able to take those emotions and ultizlize them, and accept that those emotions are the very thing that make us human, we seek to destroy them. To bury them deep within our psyche, only to be followed by dulling them even more by drugs.
As I have said before, life sucks. There will be bad days. There will be days that are harder to handle than others. If we seek to numb ourself to those emotions then we are effectively signing the death warrant of our own humanity.
All though life may suck inevitably, humanity is a gift which does not!
Assume you were injured and were on life support, paralyzied, and you damaged your ability to feel emotions. Would you rather never feel emotions again, no love nor sorrow, no friendship, nor hatred in exchange for being able to have your physical life back. Or would you choose to stay in the current state in exchange for being able to understand and interpret the love felt caused by the company around you?
