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1 in 4 UK adults now prescribed antidepressants - leafie
(www.leafie.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Psychedelic therapy should be trialled and rolled out.
We need out of the box thinking.
As a proponent of psychedelics, this can't be the solution. The fact that 25% of the population is impacted enough to warrant a prescription is scary, but psychs won't fix it long term. The underlying societal issues need to be tackled.
As I heard Psychedelics can work great in terms of curing mental illnesses. But you're rright. When you have such an obvious Problem with mental health, you can't give everyone the stuff they need to be happy. Its fighting the symptoms, not the cause.
It could help while people learn to live with their mental illness.
I'd rather have a good trip every few weeks with a renewed sense of perspective than taking pills everyday that makes me less me.
Some of those pills make you more you.
Imagine waking up every day knowing how hard just everything is going to be, how it's going to take every ounce of effort you have to be and act the way you want to, like carrying 100 pounds on your shoulders from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
Now imagine taking a pill and that burden is just...gone. You get up in the morning, and things are fine. Something happens on the way to work, or at work, or your kids just do some dumb kid shit when you get home from work and, rather than having to have one more thing on that giant burden you've gotten used to carrying around that puts you over the edge, it's just one thing. You deal with it and move on.
That's what being on antidepressants was like for me. I'd wake up and be in a good mood for no damned reason. Bad stuff would happen and I wouldn't be upset for the day, or the week. I loved being on antidepressants. And when it got to the point where nothing was bothering me nearly as much as it should have, I talked to my doctor and got my dosage reduced, then eventually stopped my prescription altogether. Taking that medication for 5 years was the best thing I could have done, and I wish I'd done it at least a decade sooner.
This may not be how it turns out for everyone, but don't stigmatize taking pills just because of some perceived weakness or dependence. Sometimes it's exactly the right choice. Sometimes psychedelics may be the right choice. Everyone is different, and will need different tools to help them deal with their stuff.
I don't stigmatize people for taking pills, I hate that we are banning substances that are beneficial to humans because it makes them trip a little.
I am on antidepressants and I'd much rather take psychedelics every other weeks than taking two different pills everyday for the years to come with a multitude of terrible side effects.
There is a lot of promising researchs done with psychedelics, but because of old fucks we're criminals if we literally grow mushrooms.
The way antidepressants are used today is so that we can keep being a cog in the machine.
So my issue with all this is that antidepressants just numb the symptoms, not fix the root cause of the problem. So if at least part of the solution was fun, then it wouldn't be so bad.
But instead, we have antidepressants that makes us productive enough to still work, but it fucks up your gut, your mind, your sexuality and your self-confidence, so that you can make money for someone else.
I feel me when I am human, not a fucking drone 6 months away from homelessness.
The pills make me feel like a drone, but the alternative is destitution.
That's a fair stance. I'm not a fan of getting high, but I'm even less a fan of making people live the way I want to live. And we absolutely need to expand our toolset for dealing with neurochemistry imbalances that are leaving people unable to enjoy life, as well as changing our societal structures so we don't have so many people being unhappy for perfectly legitimate reasons.