Kathy Dettwyler asks,

<< do these drugs (Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac) work to elevate mood in people who
are depressed for good reason? >>

My mother is a lifelong chronic depressive.  Our experience with her
treatment has been that SSRIs (in her case mostly Prozac) don't exactly lift
her mood at all.  Rather they make her misery seem to her like a really
crappy part of life, instead of an overwhelming fireblanket totally
smothering her life -- they make them less delusional in context.

For example, shortly before she first began Prozac, she explained to me in a
hospital ICU that she had HAD to attempt suicide (pretty real attempt, too)
because her marital troubles with my father (also quite real) had meant that
she soon would have no health insurance.    These issues where huge for her
-- she has life threatening illnesses even aside from depression, so no
health insurance was terrifying, and since she's devoted her life to being a
SAHM & "professional wife" the possibility of divorce was also hugely
identity-crushing.

And yet suicide is probably not the answer to those problems, if you see my
point.

Prozac didn't make her happy.  But it did make her not nuts, so that she
could deal in therapy helpfully with her many, very real, problems.   Therapy
was impossibly and unproductive until her brain chemistry was just a little
more stable, so that you had something to work with.

The lifechanging result has been six years with no suicide attempts -- this
may be a low standard of happiness but you can probably imagine what a relief
it is to her and to everyone around her.

I think that for a lot of people who have real troubles but whose way of
facing them (or not!) is depressive, this pattern can be typical with SSRI
treatment.

So for your friend they may really help make her able to cope with misery,
even if they cannot make the misery go away.  I hope so --

Elisheva

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