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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest reason I never committed suicide was that I didn't have the willpower for even that.

One of the most dangerous periods for depressed people is shortly after they start treatment. They are still depressed, but suddenly have the energy to commit suicide, and a certain fraction of them do.

My wife lost a cousin that way. :-(

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Also consider that many SSRIs actually list suicidal urges as a side effect. In my transition from Celexa to Prozac to Effexor, I've found that transitioning period to be particularly bad. Not to go into too much detail but I've done things of late I never did before and my doctor has said it's likely my change in medication. They say things need to be at their worst before they can get better. That's my mantra.

Effexor literally made me think and act in ways I never had before. There's the disassociative feeling you get from depression, and then there's what Effexor did; effectively making me a ticking time-bomb with an insanely vivid, active (and morbid) imagination. Really dark times, and coincidentally a few months after I'd quit it, Time magazine had a cover article about the rise of [teen] suicides because of it.

Can I ask what you switched to after dropping Effexor? My email is listed in my profile if you wish to answer privately.

Quite honestly it scared the shit out of me to the point where I no longer felt safe seeking aid from people who claimed to have answers. At the end of the day, none of the other anti-d's I'd tried (all of the major ones) did anything but take any emotions - negative or positive - away, and that's not how I wanted to live. For years I wasn't on anything, but more recently I tried Wellbutrin to similar results. As such I've made it more of a mission to find out what it really is that's causing this, rather than apply a band-aid to what is really just a side-effect of a bigger issue.

I'm sorry anti-depressants didn't work out for you. Luckily I've only had to try out two different types before finding the one for me. Wellbutrin was my first ad but it made me feel like an emotionless robot. I then got on prozac and rather than make me a robot it made me feel normal. Not exactly happy but definitely not sad. Which is what I was going for anyway. Good luck, also, if you didn't try therapy, i suggest you do.

They're often on the tail of years of anxiety and depression, plus environmental stressors which aren't going to disappear through talking or medication.

Sometimes you take a pill and the problem is solved. But often, it's a matter of a struggle for better, not fixed. Or a decision between the illness and the side effects of continuous medication.

But ignoring it is a terrible option.

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