My experience is that meds take the symptoms away. You no longer feel sad, but you are still "depressed". Kind of like pain medication takes the pain away, but your leg is still broken.

I experienced depression as symptom of a deeper "illness" of the brain that needs to be cured with psychotherapy. If it wasn't for that I'd still make the same mistakes again and again that made me depressed in the first place.

I'm going to disagree with the others, in my experience the correct combination of medications allows a depressed/anxious person to feel happy. It doesn't necessarily "make you happy" like recreational drugs do. "Feeling numb" is a common depression symptom, so I feel others are confusing it with that. Although if you use too much xanax/klonopin/lithium, etc. then yes it will make you more numb. But SSRI's, SNRI's, and NDRI's don't do that.

Depression is usually a cycle, I'm too tired to go to class, ends up failing classes, great now I'm a useless human, fails more classes, becomes too tired to do anything I normally enjoy, can't focus on homework, becomes more depressed, socializing causes too much anxiety to make friends, etc. This was me last year.

The hope is that with the correct combination of medications you'll manage to "break" this loop. You can start to focus again, maybe complete some homework. You have enough energy to get yourself to class. Your grades improve, you don't self-loath as much, your life improves, you make supportive friends.

Once you have your life back in your control you can consider discontinuing your medication. You might go off it and be fine, now that you were able to focus on your stresses in life and how to handle them, you may find you don't have any issues without your medication. Or everything becomes worse again and you have to stay on it.

To be honest, modern psychiatry is kinda a crapshoot and nobody knows 100% for sure how antidepressants work, why some people don't respond at all to prozac but do to cymbalta, etc. There's a lot of research involving your diet, your gut bacteria's health, your immune system's effect on mood, etc. All of these will be a factor.

Depends on whether the depression is situational. People don't like to admit that sometimes people are sad because their situation, and not because of something inherent to themselves. Sadness -- even persistent sadness -- can sometimes be a healthy response to an unhealthy environment, that drives you to try and change your situation for the better.

The problem is when the sadness becomes the crippling kind that prevents you from acting to change the situation that's making you sad to begin with. It can be helpful, I think, to take anti-depressants long enough for you to be able to enact positive change in your life.

My wife was taking anti-depressants as she finished up college, then she went traveling, met me while we were both backpacking, we got married, have two kids. She weaned off the anti-depressants while we were engaged. She gets transitory anxiety attacks every once in a while, but she's told me she's never had a relapse of depression. I think she was just bored and lonely and stressed in college -- a temporary situation.

This is all just my personal opinion, i'm not a psychiatrist.

Depends. If the depression is somewhat "temporary", as it was for me at one point, then a temporary prescription can help smooth out your emotional state while you cope with the cause.

Meanwhile I expect to be on my anti-anxiety medication for my life, as my brain chemistry is not going to fix itself.

There are too many different factors that affect depression. Genetic susceptibility, time of year, relationships, various psychological factors, social factors, etc. Meds will not cure depression, but they will alleviate the symptoms while you work on addressing some of the factors that cause it.

Think of it like Ibuprofen. It's there to help you manage pain, but it won't fix things.

Depression is a symptom, not a disease. If the underlying cause is long-lasting, then you're stuck on the meds forever e.g. bipolar disorder is a chronic disease and requires mood stabilizers (and, in type II, antidepressants) to be taken indefinitely. But in the case of treatable or temporary conditions like PTSD, anti-depressants can just be used to reduce symptoms while other treatments are under way.

Major Depressive Disorder is a specific disease that's commonly called "depression", and I have no idea what the long-term treatments look like there.

There is no causal relationship with meds and getting rid of depression.

It can "numb" the feelings, like pain meds (as others have said).

This varies from person to person. As it's been explained to me, some people are indeed "lifers", others use it temporarily (years, even, but not necessarily for the rest of his/her life). Meds alone generally don't make the depression "go away".