Kathy, you wrote,
<< It took me at least 8 months to stop grieving about having a child with
Down Syndrome -- every day for those first eight months I would wake up,
remember, and cry. Then I would go take care of my adorable little baby boy.
>>
I think, when people talk about "2 weeks before treatment," they are talking
more about the person who wakes up, cries -- and CANNOT get out of bed and
take care of her baby. When my grandmother, for example, lost her father,
she "took to her bed" for a YEAR -- her husband hired 24-hour-a-day childcare
for her two children under age 3. That's not sad -- that's disabled.
What you are describing is horrible sadness, but it doesn't sound like the
kind of inability to engage the world that is characteristic of depression
that IMO needs treatment -- or at least in which case treatment can greatly
reduce the collateral damage to the depressed person and her whole family.
Nor is offering drug treatment a form of blame for feeling sadness, anymore
than talk-therapy and hand holding are blame. Hopefully treatment comes from
compassion. The question is whether it helps or is a waste of time, money,
and energy (the last of which is especially low in depressed people).
People don't have firewalls between their psyches and their lives, and many
very real depressions are precipitated by a life event. SSRIs are no magic
bullet, and lots of people who can be helped by them need other help as well
-- and we all know that not all of them get it. But that doesn't mean that
these drugs can't be a very valuable PART of helping them.
Or to put it another way, a person with the very real sadness-causing
situation of life-threatening cancer definitely does not need a
life-threatening depression on top of it. So if we have a treatment that
will leave her with only one of those, it seems worth using.
Elisheva
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