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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

You’re describing situational depression. A lot of people have chronic depression, where he only hope for managing the depression involves pharmaceuticals.

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As someone who used to suffer from chronic depression, that's simply not true. Treatment is difficult, and pills are the easiest solution, but claiming they're the "only hope" is bordering on industry propaganda.

Pharmaceuticals on the market today don’t have a great track record in treating chronic depression. The first time a depression victim takes a drug it has a 66% failure rate: https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/treatment-resistant-d...

Drugs like MDMA are being evaluated as a potential treatment as well: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/mdma-depression

33% success rate on first try is better than I'd expected.

Anecdotally, I've heard it usually takes several tries to find an antidepressant that works for any given patient. But once you've found a drug that works, that helps a lot.

*clinical depression which could easily stem from long-term, chronic situational depression, life circumstances, etc.

Which is completely irrelevant in many cases. Depression can be caused by serotonin deficiencies, and once you’ve got depressed (pun intended) values, it’s difficult to return to baseline without medical support.

> clinical depression which could easily stem from long-term, chronic situational depression, life circumstances, etc.

It could as easily not stem from it.

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