I'm in complete agreement with you here - the majority of people prescribed SSRIs probably should not have been. I don't even recommend them to other people, despite the fact that they worked incredibly well for me.
> With all due respect to your situation -- and not intended in the least to belittle either your suffering, or the thought you put into the decisions you made -- perhaps the bigger mistake was not going off SSRIs (at which point the die may have been more or less cast for you, in the short- to medium-term) -- but agreeing to go on them in the first place.
It wasn't a mistake. The mental illnesses I suffered started early in childhood, and nearly all my relatives on one side of my family experience some form of it. I resisted medication for a while because I was brought up by parents who considered psych meds to be against the natural order of things, and prohibited me from so much as asking my doctor about them.
In college, the panic attacks had become so severe I was beginning to lose touch with reality. My psychiatrist convinced me to give SSRIs a shot, so I reluctantly agreed, and they turned my life around. Within 6 months, friends and family (both those who knew I was taking a med and those who didn't) remarked that I seemed to be a completely different (and better) person.
Obviously, they don't work this well for most people. But likely the psychiatrist, in the absence of a mature scientific understanding of these disorders, had learned to recognize patterns that predicted a successful response to SSRIs.
My only point was that the discontinuation of an antidepressant should not be taken lightly when you have already had a successful response to it.