Antidepressant round-up

[DanaC]

With respect Shawnee: that is your experience of clinical depression. Not everybody's experience of clinical depression is the same. Not everybody with depression would be suicidal without meds.

Different people experience different kinds of depression and they are debilitated in different ways and to different extents. What you look at from a distance and see as 'blues' might be depression. What looks like depression from a distance, might be the blues.

Someone who has never experienced depression telling someone with clinical depression to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is annoying yes. It's not at all helpful, and shows an ignorance on their part as to what depression is. But it's not helpful either to mark out some competetive sliding scale that ranks 'proper' depressives as people who are completely incapacitated by depression if untreated, and anything else as a not really depression.

How do you know whether that person is truly depressed or just has the blues? You only get a fraction of what other people experience, and what you get is skewed by their own understanding of themselves, and their own ability to express.