Antidepressants: For or Against?

My own belief is that in probably 95% of cases, those diagnosed with depression don't really have what I would call clinical depression. They basically just have 'this part of my life sucks and it's making me feel bad' depression. It doesn't stop doctors from throwing brain altering pills at the problem though that do little to actually help solve the underlying cause. I'm sure I could have easily passed for depression at many points in my life but the only time I truly felt like I was suffering from actual genuine depression was when I first initially quit porn and plunged into this deep, helpless hole where I felt I was drowning in hopelessness. Thankfully that only lasted a few weeks but if someone is living with that on a constant day-to-day basis then I would support their decision for taking medication, otherwise I just see it as a case of taking pills in order to feel happy about the unhappy situation they have created for themselves, or fallen into.

As far as depression and addiction go, I think it can work both ways. Depression can lead to the addiction but the opposite is equally true. Whether you can beat an addiction whilst suffering from depression(even if it's what I'd call circumstantial depression) I'm not so sure about but there are healthier ways to combat it than taking pills. Studies have shown that regular running or other high intensity exercise has the same anti-depressive effect on the brain as actual ADs, just without any of the other unwanted negative side-effects that ADs often come with.

 

I would say it depends on the degree to which you're able to get your shit together. I've gone cold turkey into noPMO at the end of August and have had no problems whatsoever keeping the streak — but I've had a very clear idea on why I don't want to keep on watching porn. Well, not hard-mode on the first month, I would masturbate 1x/week (whilst previously I've been doing it every freaking day). Anyway, I did decide to go hardmode around a month ago, but none of this would be possible had I not decided to get on 25mg of trazodone before sleep at the beginning of nofap. I quit anti-depressants altogether 2,5 years ago, right before a painful breakup and my entrance into psychoanalysis. The whole time I've been struggling with awful insomnia, constant disconnection from the world and society, awful anhedonia and irritation, and I blame a big part of it on porn. However, I wouldn't be able to quit it if I didn't feel safe about my sleep — I'd constantly have these nights after which, even if I managed to sleep which also was very hard to do, I'd feel like I did not rest the slightest. Now I've raised the dose to 50mg, to have my mood a bit more stable. I still have bad problems with as if being constantly functioning on and dependant on adrenaline (idk, something like disturbed HPA axis?), randomly having bad energy crashes during the day. I just feel I've had enough of trying to be a strong macho, and I'm just trying to make my life easier, because healing from a porn-disturbed brain is no joke, and I'm writing my thesis this year. I workout, I eat healthy, I sleep 8+h every night, I don't drink, don't smoke trees, no drugs, I have a well-paid mini job, I practice an instrument 2h everyday, yet this all alone isn't enough to feel like I'm not constantly, unless being excited about something or I really have to do something, or I've told myself authoritatively enough that I have to, on the edge of swooning and collapsing onto the ground from exhaustion.

I would say, first of all — some form of therapy and I would recommend the most the orthodox Lacanian psychoanalysis, even though it is difficult as fuck, hard to find, and not refunded. This should make you realize and separate your needs from your desire, what you enjoy from what you cause yourself pain with, and help you get a true idea of who you are and what you want. Well, complicated idea — it also isn't anything with any promises whatsoever, it's a pure bet, and you can't know anything about the timing (for me it's been 2,5 years where first couple of months were 1x/ week, then ~1 year 2x/week and the last more than 6 months 3x/week); the only certain is that if you really work in it, you'll find out the truth, and that will usually not mean that you're great and awsome, and so on. But even this itself won't to do the job — what's gonna be holding you back are all the behaviours that further jeopardize your mental health, and this you have to really do something about, but it might not be easy if you're, for instance, unable to go through the initial moments, or you can't really cut down a lot from your life and take vacation of some degree, and you have to keep it going. Then, antidepressants definitely come in handy and allow you to have the initial kick. I am not sure whether there'll be a moment when I can quit it again, and this time for good, have a satisfying sexual life and no frustrating and debilitating cognitive problems, etc, but I try to focus more on the now and how it helps. To building up a healthy libido, I think, a metaphor with the financial economy applies well: the less money you have, the harder it is to do something with it and have a profit. So if you really have nothing, struggle with your physiology everyday, because your body is in an overwhelming stress and exhaustion and no other means can bring it out of it, and you are already in some reliable therapy, go for a pill to kickstart or speed up the change.

I've tried with some ritalin right before and at the beginning of the nopmo journey, and weirdly the 2,5mg would make me feel so calm, and this feeling would stay with me for the next day, too. Or sometimes it would make me awfully sleepy, lol... I don't know, I'll see how much abstaining from porn, after watching it from 11 y.o. until 23 y.o. without breaks longer than 2 weeks is gonna do good to my brain, but I'm also wondering whether Wellbutrin shouldn't make things easier. Anyway, trazodone for sleep and its minimal does for the anti-depressant effect sounds soothing enough for me to worry less and so help me find stability and hope in this process.

 

I personally think that they are egregiously overprescribed and usually cause more problems than they solve. A lot of people say that the side effects are unbearable. I think that some people do have a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected with medications, but those people are a very small segment of the population. Most people with depression are just suffering from situational depression and don't need medication; they need to make some major lifestyle changes.

Sometimes I wonder how many porn addicts out there are depressed and don't even know what the culprit behind their depression is. How many of those people got roped into taking medication(s) when they don't even need to?

 

In the past I was depressed. And I mean, really depressed to a level where I only found darkness in my whole life and spirit. I almost could feel the death in my life. It was horrible.

My nature is that I'm fiercely anti medicines.
So I never used anti depressants.
Instead, in that time I begun to read about the topic, and read about life, relationships, anxiety, addictions and so on.
I discovered that knowledge could help me a bit further.
I discovered that when I should use anti depressants, I actually was afraid for experiencing my own fear.
I decided to let me experience whatever emotion was inside of me.

Anti depressants doesn't solve the problem for you.
It's just a quick way to escape reality, just as porn is.
As soon as you got enough from the medicines, the problem is still there, and needs to be resolved.

Depression is a symptom imo.
We all need to find our root issues, the real shit in our lives, the emptiness in our hearts.
Depression is about repressed emotions. If you repress emotions for a long enough time, you create a sort of dark clouds in your brain, you hide yourself more and more because all these emotions become a thick wall between you and the outside world.

Professional help is highly recommended. It can be a huge help to have someone you really trust and to who you can talk about whatever topics. (S)he could help you with letting out all the pain and fear and slowly break down the depression. In the meanwhile the survival coping mechanisms should be revealed and healthy ways to cope with life situations should be learned.

It's not an easy path. It's a heavy and difficult path.
But today, I can say:
I was depressed for I think 10 years in my life.
Nowadays, I feel free from it. I can have bad days, bad mood or feel sad, but the heavy depression is gone.
My addictions and fetishes are gone. My last porn session is almost 500 days ago.

So I know it's possible to grow out of a depressed and addicted life. Without antidepressants.

 

@DTournesol
Because of a lot of social criticism inline with the capitalist ideology: from the critics of Freud in his lifetime, through things like Sokal affair, and today's quasi-scientistic aversion, psychoanalysis is often rather ridiculed. Yeah, the thing with it is that it really is not designed in terms of effectiveness, contribution to your well-being, etc. It's not designed in any way and each analysis is absolutely different, completely individual. Also, for many it appears as a dogma or at least a religious-like belief. In Lacanian praxis there's the whole jargon, most of the theory is hardly accessible — unless you've been trained in philosophy or literary studies, e.g. However, if you really commit to going to your sessions and go through that hell, accept that the ways you're narrating your reality or yourself might be to a great extent a defence of a sort, embrace all that uncertainty that accompanies life and progress and learn how to live with it, not to try to reject desire like in buddhism but learn how to live with a lack, oh boy, is so much easier to be alive and to enjoy being alive.