You certainly have been through a lot of tragedy. I’m sorry about your first wife. 23 is so young. And I’m sorry about what happened to your second wife. Hope she’s doing well now.
I’ve always had a mistrust of psychotropic medications, but I do understand that they’re necessary sometimes.
The medications can turn on a person fast. All it takes is for example a patient taking an antidepressant to get a cold and take OTC NyQuil. That is one of the most common triggers of Serotonin Syndrome. I also believe strongly they should not be given to teens except when all other means including One on One Therapy has failed and other causes ruled out. I believe either unintentionally some of the school shooters etc have had this reaction or figured out how to "Trip" taking antidepressants. The unintentional ones they knew not what they did or caused. It really can be more potent than LSD.
Doctors prescribe the deemed mainly by media and social pressures "Safer" antidepressants and cringe in horror at the extremely media over-hyped boogieman class of meds like Valium, Xanax, Librium, etc which have a bloodstream life of only hours.
A doctor can give a patient a Benzo and have the person sit in the waiting room for about 30-60 minutes and he's going to see pretty much how the person reacts to the medication. antidepressants take up to a month to reach full therapeutic levels in the bloodstream and adverse reaction can happen at any point in between.