comparing depression to diabetes was a very telling thing to do, although you probably did not know it.

You get diabetes from loving those doughnuts too much. It's a direct correlation.

When I am in third world countries, I am often surprised at myself. I am not going to make any dumb statements about how wonderful it is to be poor--it's not. But sometimes I am happier there than here. Small annoyances matter less. Small things that are good become more enjoyable and meaningful.

The daily striving bears some fruit. It's hard, in America, to see the worth of what you are doing. What are you going to do with your success, buy MORE cars, MORE clothes, MORE food? You can only use so much. Being at saturation point, constantly, leaves a sense of emptiness.

Yes, a lot of the people I met in India and Honduras and so on needed and wanted a lot of things (including to get into America). But surprisingly, more of these people seem happy to be alive than my friends in the States. I mean just happy to be here, happy to have a crack at this life.

Diabetics have eaten too many doughnuts; the very thing they love is their undoing. Maybe depressives have too much of something, of material things, of wealth, of medicine, of painlessness, of ease, of entertainment. We have too much of all these things.

Strawberry thinks this is unfair. The things we love to consume are making us sick! I don't; I think this is very natural and nature's way of telling us to find balance. Our physical surfeits make us sick; our emotional and mental surfeits may be doing the same. Maybe trying to understand this is the reason I'm not needing medication.

If you think that life in a village in Central America or Asia with no running water or electricity would be so awful, so unbearable, so difficult as to be not worth living, it may be time to pack up and go spend some time in one. You might not need antidepressants so much when you come out (not to mention, nobody there has access to anything like that, and yet people are surprisingly chipper. Which makes you wonder--I mean, they HAVE reasons to be depressed).

What I'm trying to say is complicated, and maybe I'm not expressing it well. Just some thoughts on a snowy day here where I am :)

thyroid conditions are rarely a cause of obesity, yet people will never stop flinging thyroid disease in your face as a reason why the obese cannot be said to be simply eating themselves to death. That implies too much responsibility.

Type 2 diabetics dwarf the numbers of Type 1s. The two diseases in fact are almost unrelated. Yet type 2s throw Type 1 around as a reason why they are not at fault for what has happened to them.

Some people, unfortunately, get the rolls of the dice which you describe, but that proves nothing; it's a straw man.

The problem is everybody who is on meds insists vehemently and loudly that they have severe, real biochemical depression and they'd be jumping in front of a bus if they couldn't get their Zoloft. And yet the numbers would suggest that this simply cannot be true.

Even doctors don't really know who needs it and who doesn't; depression is different from obesity and diabetes and lung cancer in this respect. I'm not going to tell you or anybody else that you shouldn't take your meds. But I do think the whole issue, every corner of it, needs to be in the public discourse, much more than it is.

I find it strange that the med takers on this thread keep screaming at us to shut up, though. That would imply some defensiveness and possibly some chagrin on their part.

You are probably suffering a rebound or boomerang effect, something that can be observed even when taking cough medications. As with true addiction, you have to get through the rebound before you feel right again. From what I've been told though, there's a difference between rebound and withdrawal, but I don't know, they sound the same to me.

I posted a question about this earlier on the thread but none of the satisfied users seemed to want to answer it.

If these things are truly addictive then this is some bad shit. Even if they aren't, it's bad enough.

from the guy (who takes meds) who lives abroad who says that people without access to the buffet of mood elevating drugs are "really" as depressed as people in the States. They just "seem happy" and appear to get along all right.

Now that's just funny.