I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Was on Prozac, and then something else that escapes me. The drugs made me feel so off that I really couldn’t do much except ride it out. I had gone to ‘the best psychiatrist’ in the area, and he was nothing but a high priced pusher of drugs, and when the ‘drug of the day’ didn’t work, he wanted to add something else. It seemed like I could only get through that mess if I had some kind of recovery. The side effects were horrific sometimes. Sweating, stinky BO, weird heart rate excursions, weird dreams, weird visual artifacts, and on and on.
I finally said ‘ENOUGH!!’. I had bad reactions to some of them too, and was just tired of feeling drugged. I stopped a lot of what I saw in my diet as ‘counter productive’, and started doing things that I thought might help. I stopped caffeine, I started walking more, I started listening to more classical music (Mozart, etc). I started reading more, I sat out in the sun more, I walked through the grass in my bare feet. Sounds clique, but try it. I stopped worrying about people that I really didn’t care about, and stopped listening to the trolls in the world I inhabited. I also started riding after a long time off, and found a lot of trails and great places to rip and scare myself. I guess I was enjoying life instead of wanting to be shielded from it by drugs. Not to say that some would benefit from pharmaceuticals, but be careful who you go for help. I went to one doc who was prescribing meds that required lab test monitoring, and he wouldn’t do any of it. He was a good physician, but was being urged to prescribe by the drug company reps that would be there fairly often. (The drug rep issues have gotten better since then, but are not zero)
I also learned ho depression can breed anxiety, and anxiety can breed depression. They seem to go hand in hand quite a bit.
But out of all of it, I was amazed at the inefficiencies of the drug delivery network. Psychiatrists used to listen to their clients and now are like a gumball machine. Oh, that med didn’t work, well here, try this one. Family practice (and other) docs/PA’s/etc were prescribing drugs that they probably shouldn’t be able to, and were not doing the followup expected/required by the manufacturer. Don’t assume that you need a pill. And some of those pills carry long lasting cardiac side effects to be concerned about for people training.
If you need help, try to determine what help you need. Drugs aren’t the answer for everyone, but in an overworked medical system, giving someone a bottle of pills is fast and easy. Be good to yourself…
And this ll happened probably 30 + years ago. I had family die, job changes, a lot to weigh me down. I probably had every right to be a little depressed and anxious. The drugs didn’t help, I’m just glad they didn’t hurt me, long term.