gee I don’t know. Lets just take everyone off their meds and see what happens, shall we?
Surely Cho Loughner Holmes and Lanza could have been managed with better parenting, better teachers, talk therapy, whole diets and more exercise. Oh and more gun control.
Families who live with the mentally ill, or those who have battled clinical depression, bipolar and schizophrenia among others- should be able to tell you about living with an unmedicated person
Doctors need to dig deeper for other causes and give familiy members possible Adverse reaction warnings. Read my post on this thread.
Unmedicated before or after they became dependent on the medicine?
I've never taken a SSRI, but I have lived with mentally ill people --- when I was doing Women's Shelter work for a Catholic Charity. There were people who needed either to be medicated or to be restrained, pronto. It was hell for us ---and for them --- not to be able to get what they needed.
On the other hand, I am very wary of head meds being given to adolescents and young adults, particularly males, when they are presenting with depression, anxiety or mild antisocial behaviors. Something like 9 out of 10 recent school-killings, family-killings and other mass killings have been committed by young males who were on --- or just got off of --- SSRI's.
I myself used to use Ambien (not a SSHI --- it's a hypnotic) for insomnia, and I didn't like the side effects: incredibly vivid, bizarre dreams. Even "serial" dreams: where you wake up briefly, somewhat scared, and think "Geez, that was bizarre" --- and then fall back asleep and pick up the dream right where it left off, and go on for Episode 2 and Episode 3. And it was worse, getting OFF of Ambien.
So I expressed my discontent to my doctor, and she put me on Amitriptyline --- again, not a SASRI, but one of the older tricyclic antidepressants. I didn't even now it was an "antidepressant" until I googled it on my own and saw that has, for some people, some of the same issues as the SSRI's. Since I'm not depressive AT ALL, I decided to discontinue the Amitriptyline and try to address the insomnia issues as best I could with warm milk, pumpkin seeds, stretching exercises, melatonin: whatever.
So my questions about these meds is very sincere. I'd like to have a better idea of when they are appropriate, and when they are not.