It’s more telling if you know them prior to medicine. I dated a girl who was bipolar. She was tolerable in small doses. She was capable of being really sweet but you eventually began to annoy her and she became unbearable.
I hang out with her now and she is medicated. But if she gets off her meds, she can be a demon. It’s like that “capable of being sweet” trigger is gone. The medicine destroys the coping mechanism.
All of these drugs are as different as the people who are treated with them.
I think what draws criticisms like this article implies is that the medical profession really has little idea as to how these medicines actually work. In fact they admit it in the extended documentation.
In addition to that, with a psychological issue, a placebo can often be temporarily effective.....so the drugs are a easy target for critical papers of this kind.
I have had a brief (18 month) experience with a SRI drug some 20 years ago and found that it was useful for my depression which was similar to a PTSD episode. I found that it worked on my conscious mind in the same way that a child erases a crappy drawing on a one of those etcho sketch toys, by shaking it gently and a fresh canvas is ready for a new drawing.
My experience was similar to that.
I no longer dwelled on my emotional baggage and it was a new canvas I was painting on.
When I stopped the use of the drug (against the doctors recommendations) I found that I could barely recall details during the previous 18 months, like conversations, movies I may have seen...etc..
So....IMO, what this stuff does generally speaking is to change the canvas of your mind, ever so slightly. This helps to relieve you from the picture that was causing you to relive emotional trauma and keep reliving it, over and over..
Is it a chemical imbalance???
Probably not...and I agree with the premise that the imbalance explanation is flawed or utter baloney, but the drugs do in fact help with the complex nature of the human mind and it’s emotionally laden matrix and how it handles what life often gives us to deal with.
Call it a chemically induced perception shift...
I also do not think that using these drugs for the rest of your life is warranted for all patients, and I don’t think doctors are competent to tell the difference so they use the same baseless instructions and explanations of the treatment for everyone.