I think antidepressant drugs have their place when used to treat older people but are a disaster for younger people. I'm not sure exactly where the cutoff would be. I'm guessing I'd put it at 23 or so. I think by 23 the brain has locked in controls that the drugs can't override as they can in a younger person. But if I'm wrong find out what age it is and use that age.
I'm really glad such drugs didn't exist when I was young, I'd have been on them and have hurt someone. Parents divorced when I was 8, and I was extremely angry and it was deep anger. I was on the leading edge of that '70s easy divorce thing. Thanks liberals, feminists. I didn't know I was angry and I didn't know I was depressed. But I wasn't like my peers either, I was down, withdrawn, depressed. My nervous system could not take what was going on with my family. I read about depression years after I came out of mine (which lasted about 20 years) and realized I was reading about myself. I'm still angry but I know it.
Looking back, and my advice to young people having trouble coping, don't take the drugs, just suffer the depression and wait for it subside on its own maybe decades later. That's better than taking a drug which one day crosses the wires in the brain and makes you go berserk. The anger will come out one way or another. Better it be under your control than not.
One of my professors explained recently that he been been doing some personal research into the effects of anti-depression drugs on young people. It appears that depression runs in his family and he’s had to deal with it. I don’t remember the details, but he said that these drugs work in layers and one of these layers inhibited/removed inhibitations and did so in a different order in kids than it did in adults. So these kids had inhibitations removed before the depression was improved, thus making it more likely that they might commit suicide. LOTS more research needs to be done.
BYW, Jason, thanks for your thoughtful post. I’m glad to read that you’ve figured out a lot of this and I wish you the best as you continue to release your anger.