I am by no means advocating against taking anti-depressants, I am just sharing my own experience. I have to say this because I have seen people with severe depression make night and day transformations off of these medications and know they can work.

For me, it wasn't an SSRI, but a norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor - often prescribed for treatment-resistant depression. In my early 20's, I had tried everything, nothing seemed to work, then these treated the physical symptoms pretty well - I got my energy and motivation back, sleep normalized.

After several years though they stopped working. We upped the dose until there was nowhere left to go. At the dose I was taking, it was very important to take it at the precise right time or you could spiral into some very bad symptoms. Drink at all, or just a little too much, could spiral you into an episode. I finally decided that it was worth being depressed than what I was dealing with physically and emotionally on the drug, so I stopped it.

It was a rough month or two but I entered a new treatment program, the doctor found I was severely D3 deficient. We worked on my sleep habits, nutrition, diet - finally discovering what I had was seasonal affective disorder. So we have a plan for those months, and honestly, it's been 2 years off of them and I have never felt better.

Depression is a complicated condition, there's no one treatment in my mind, it's a lot of contributing factors. I won't take them again, especially since there's a moderate chance these drugs actually worsen depression and highly increase risk of suicide. Doctors will just prescribe them without much warning, and that is what I hate, not the drugs themselves.