Appologies, didn't mean to come across as dismissive. There are many types of depression. The type of depression that MAOIs worked best for were 'funks' - to help the person get an energy boost to get them out of bed. It is simplistic to try to treat depression as a chronic condition with palliative drugs.

I'm dismissive of Allopathic Psychiatry because those doctors hurt my friend, and force her to take prescriptions to make her substance abuse problems worse. Really all she needs is sobriety, adequate nutrition, and a few basic medical interventions. But she's much more profitable as a ward who will never get better.

https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/

Someone reached out to me about this piece... Said she got the postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis, and considers the actual effects of some of the drugs she was forced to take 'torture'.

Benzo's hurt a lot of people, without actually fixing anyone's problems. The only use for a benzo is as a single-dose regimen, e.g. to help get a claustrophobic person into an MRI machine. Gamma-Hydroxybutyric Acid (GHB) is a great pro-GABA drug that crosses the blood brain barrier. It's now highly controlled because it can also be used nefariously (date rape drug). Why fix people's problems when you can create them?

> as is lithium

My friend called me up and said she'd bought herself some lithium. I strongly cautioned against it. 8 or 12 hours later she was despondent. I pointed out how she'd poisoned herself that morning and told her to throw the rest away.

She did the same with... 5HTP? Something to increase serotonin 'naturally'. She tried it multiple times, it wrecked her each time. I told her to throw that stuff away too, I think she finally did.

Depression is fundamentally a metabolic problem: sometimes nutritional, sometimes thyroid function, sometimes amplified by emotional stress, sometimes energetic ('people who are depressed are always [energetically] homolateral'). People get seasonal depression when the sun goes away for the winter. Supplemental red light can't be put in a pill (red light refreshes cytochrome c oxidase [mitochondria]). Etc.

ECT tries to reset people's brains, without doing anything else. It's a simplistic treatment that needs to be treated like calomel/quicksilver (mercury).

Palliative drugs never fix the problem. Sometimes they can be useful (Reversible MAOI's, such as Methylene Blue) while you figure out what's going on.