For many who take anti-depressants it isn't simply about "being glum", it's about depressions that are incredibly long, deep, painful, and life altering. Sure, there probably are some class of people using these drugs for escapism, but my guess is the vast majority use them because they are having difficulty functioning period.

Long bouts of depression often lead to self destructive habits, whether mental, physical, or chemical. Depression for those isn't simply about being happy or sad, it's about having your life torn appart from the inside out. It's about having your most down moment extended for months even years, all the while chewing away at your sense of self.

So, don't trivialize the argument by suggesting that most of the prescribed do so simply to run away from the sadness of life. This isn't some rainy day melancholy they feel, for many its seemingly insurmountable and interminable hell.

It reminded me to take my Celexa.

between clinical depression which is what Scathew is describing and situational or temporary depression which is what most people have. 10 years ago I was in a horrid marriage, had health problems, had children with health problems, had money problems and I took antidepressants. They made me happy about everything. I remember seeing the movie Blast from the Past and being incredibly enthusiastic about it, ridiculously so. Anyway, 10 years later, am out of the marriage, have the same kids just older now, have the same crappy job and I'm not on antidepressants at all, nothing like it. I get a little lonely sometimes to be honest, but I'm not depressed and anxious like I was, or worried all the time about what people think of me.

I just did a few things like quit banging my head against the wall trying to be perfect and having things that not only can I not afford, (like cars and houses), I don't really need. I'm not kidding. Having a house is lots o' work that you do when you're done w/your real work, and I do miss having a car and may yet get one, but so far PT is working fine. One of my biggest health problems turned out to be a medication I was taking for epilepsy. Now they have a new one that is not a depressant, so to the drug companies, I am grateful for that. The weird thing is I had to find out about it from my neurologist. They never advertised it on TV, tho it has been life-changing.

you probably don't need social anxiety disorder medication.

Within the past week someone close to me has begun taking a low-dose of Zoloft due to stress from his job and hey, life in general.

He went to a GP after he had vomited that morning due to anxiety and stress about his job, and was hoping for a referral to a psychologist so he could work through some issues, and maybe come up with some strategies for tackling the stress in his life.

The GP was decidedly uncomfortable with the whole thing. He wrote off a perscription for Zoloft. I think that lots of GPs are more comfortable perscribing pills to treat your problems that to help you get to the root-cause of those problems to actually SOLVE them. Its the equivalent of looking at a person with a deep painful gash in their arm and perscribing pain-killers instead of stiches.

You see, its much more socially acceptable to be on 'happy pills' than to admit that you're seeing a shrink, especially if you're a guy. It also means you don't have a fear of judgement or rejection that comes with speaking about your problems to a stranger. And hey, who has time right? Taking pills means you don't have to make and keep regular appointments, which lots of us don't have time for (possibly why we're stressed and depressed in the first place).

Maybe if therapy was more acceptable, or if it was less costly and easier to get an appointment (when he called a therapist, there was a one-month wait) more people would turn to it. Maybe if primary care physicians had more contacts amongst quality psychologists to give referals to. Maybe if you're health insurance covered it. Then maybe fewer of us would be on Prozac or any of the other pills. Lots of maybes.

--, since my teens, before I finally gave in and tried an SSRI.

It's not a happy pill. And for a while it pooped out (and Effexor which I tried in its place turned out to be a nasty prescription for me).

The only thing is I don't think about killing myself every hour of every day. Which is kind of a help for the most part.

If that makes me trendy, so be it.

(Spent a couple of months, years before the SSRI, with a cognitive therapist, and, though it made me less guilty about being angry at certain things, it didn't even give me a danged placebo effect. Oh well. And again last year, and it was interesting, but hasn't made me more productive or anything. For the nonce at least I think I'd better keep taking the SSRI, so as not to spend most of my mental energy restraining myself from going off a roof.)

I happen to agree that Americans are over-prescribed and over-diagnosed with conditions and pills that they have no idea of how they will affect their lives.

I've seen 5 year olds given Prozac. I've seen 10 year olds given Zoloft. I've seen too many children given too many anti-psychotic, mind-altering drugs by the doctor. I've seen people actually get extremely agitated when they could not get their Xanax too early and go into withdrawal. I've seen people so addicted to Vicodin that they called the pharmacy 5 times in one day to ask if their doctor had called in their prescription.

I've had people go totally bonkers for not being able to get their medications because they were being refilled too early, and the insurance wouldn't pay for them.

I call these people addicts. They might have clinical depression, psychosis or ADD..but it doesn't mean the problem is being treated effectively-merely that the symptoms are. Not the true diagnosis.

Yes, we are being over-medicated by the doctors, Big Pharma and the salesmen. I'm not proud of myself for being in the pharmacy and enabling the addiction of Americans. It is less honest than selling pot or heroin on the street, and far more insidious.

I happen to think that depression is a fact of life, it comes with being a human being. True clinical depression is a rarer beast and is not as easily diagnosed-but you can't tell the difference from the ads on TV, being sponsored by any one of the drug companies.

I can't tell you what the total effects of having children on powerful medications like Ritalin, Zoloft or Prozac will be in the future...but I can tell you that we'll reap what we sow: addicted adults.