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Comment by mikedilger | Hacker News Reader

Depression may also prevent suicide because you lack the drive to take those steps. There is a pattern of people committing suicide a few weeks after starting on an anti-depressant (including one of my cousins and a late friend of mine), so much that it is listed as a side effect. I don't know if there is a double-blind study showing that the anti-depressant use is causal (and such a study is probably unethical), and depressed people are already more suicidal, so take my reasoning as a hypothesis and not a statement of fact.

But it also makes sense evolutionarily. People who suffer depression may survive periods in their life when they would otherwise commit suicide, and people who don't exit life early, meaning that depression is naturally selected.

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I suspect this is also linked to why suicide rates go up when the weather gets nicer, rather than during the colder and darker months.

The pattern you describe is very real. There’s also the hypothesis that some people actually get worse on anti-depressants. Normal people, that could have overcome depression with just enough time & counseling, becoming mentally ill & destroying their lives as a consequence of the drug itself.

There’s a lot of anti anti-depression online, bordering some sort of antivax movement.

I’ve been on medication, and what I read online about it and what my doctor and therapist say about the medication is almost completely removed.

I’d prefer counseling to medication too, but if you have doctors recommending something, generally take their advise over HN and reddit.

Arguably blindly following/trusting advice from a someone indoctrinated into a field highly influenced by regulatory capture, for profit pharmaceutical companies (who influenced and directed today's current medications) is less wise; who are also responsible for chemicals/medicines like MDMA and psychedelics to be illegal for many decades, likely primarily because they can't be patented - and therefore these companies can't compete with them - and would rather create a patented chemical that requires daily consumption, and post their clinical trials, they promote chemicals that have major withdrawal symptoms for "compliance" purposes.

If it was up to my doctor, I would still be on at least 4 different medications. I got them off by myself, and I am no longer anxious or depressed. Personally, none of these medications did anything. I did not notice side-effects either.

> I’d prefer counseling to medication too, but if you have doctors recommending something, generally take their advise over HN and reddit

That is true, but I think we should also be careful of assuming that doctors are always right. A different approach, in my opinion, would be to educate yourself in the subject by, for example, reading books from experts with different options. This is may sound too cumbersome but, I mind, it’s a whole life that’s at risk.

SSRIs and the like brute force changes: suicide is a form of violence on self, which even the clinical trials showed an increase in; you're more likely to kill yourself taking an SSRI than if you don't; likewise, violence against others - like mass school shootings - will also increase because the medications are bypassing the same mechanisms but instead of the violence being internalized, it becomes externalized.

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