Your qualifier “most of” makes little difference. It’s wrong and you couldn’t possibly know that anyway. I don’t care to share my own personal anecdotes about my experiences with various psychotropic medications but I will say that being a “zombie” has seldom been a side effect of them.

Bringing up opiates in a thread about psychiatric medication is either a deliberate red herring or a clear indicator of your ignorance on this subject. Either way you should not be putting out misinformation in a topic about potentially life-threatening medical disorders.

> Look, drugs work. They work incredibly well for some people. You absolutely should avoid them if you can help it. Makes sense, no?

I agree with this, but it’s a different statement that what I was reacting to. Your previous statement was wrong, and it’s still wrong after you tried to dig in further.

I apologize if I came off as vitriolic (truly), but I found the "zombies" statement to be very offensive, given my own run-ins with severe depression in the past.

There are problems with statements like that:

1. Turns away people who might otherwise have no better treatment option ("What's the point of living if I'll just be a zombie anyway?")

2. It comes off as judgmental which has an isolating effect to people who are on the treatment. Hearing something like this could lead a person to question their sanity when they'd otherwise be okay (aka triggering, maybe you triggered me!)

3. It's just wrong.

Antidepressant drugs generally don't turn people into zombies at commonly-prescribed therapeutic doses. At very high doses they can have an emotionally blunting effect and even this is preferable in some cases. There are side effects and no one would argue that it's ideal to be on these drugs, I totally agree with you on that, but there are worse things than being on a drug.

I think you just have to be really careful when you throw blanket statements around on these topics because the people they can influence are not feeling their best and at much higher risk for suicide than people who wouldn't care because they wouldn't need drug treatment anyway. Personally I hope to never deal with antidepressants again, but in the past they've helped me get through times when I felt otherwise out of options. And somehow I escaped turning into a zombie :)

> You absolutely should avoid them if you can help it.

The issue is knowing whether you can "tough it out". Will you make it through without medication? Will you make it through in a reasonable time frame?

It's a valid point, but I don't think it's a good idea to judge that for yourself. It's very similar to anti-biotics. It's a good idea to avoid them in general and not take them when you don't need to or when they won't do anything. But it's a terrible idea to want to make that call if you don't have the training. And it's a bad idea to figure "ah, I'm better, I'll just drop these now" after a day or two.

I personally believe that the "zombie-like state" is blown out of proportion, and I'm certain that even with side-effects, anti-depressants are still much nicer than going through a major depressive episode.