Depression Talk

Last time, we talked about whether or not depression could be considered insanity. That got me to thinking about love, because what is love if not insanity? And that got me to thinking about great pop hits from the 1980’s. (The perfect soundtrack to any crazy love affair.) And then I remembered Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right”, which contains the chorus:

You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you’re lookin’ for

So then I went to YouTube to find “You May Be Right”. And, as it turns out, all the embedding code is disabled at the request of Billy Joel’s record company. I guess I could have given up there, but now I had the bit and my teeth and I had hit full gallop.

So, I found the next best thing I could to the official video (which really ain’t that great, so you’re not missing much). I found someone who made a karoke video of the lyrics while having a really decent audio recording of the song. Instead of following the bouncing ball, we follow the light blue highlight. Because Billy Joel is such a hard singer to understand (excuse me here as I pause to roll my eyes skyward).

Even though depression does not equal insanity, the lines can get pretty blurred. One of the best things you can do to get some release from this blur is to crank a jammin’ tune up to full blast and spin around the room until you collide with the furniture.

One reason why people with depression do not seek treatment is because they don’t want to be branded as “insane”. Being diagnosed with depression does not automatically mean that you are insane. Although all types of depression are considered mental illnesses, being mentally ill does not mean that you are insane. You’re just mentally ill, which means you are just ill.

I Must Be Crazy

There is a certain underlying fear in many with depression that they are loosing their grip on reality and will eventually loose all control of their personalities, words, thoughts, actions, friends, family and posessions. “If they just knew the REAL me,” the thought is, “then they’d lock me away.”

This certainty that you might be crazy is exactly why you are not crazy. Often with depression, you are miserable for no reason at all. Nothing can cheer you up. You may not be able to taste food or get any pleasure from even sleep. Now, if you’ve lost everything in a tornado and feel depressed, you never doubt that you are sane. You just lost everything in a tornado. Anyone would be depressed after gong through that. If you were happy as a lark, then you’d be locked away.

Why? Because being increedibly happy after a disaster is not normal and not healthy.

Yet, neither is feeling miserable when nothing bad seems to have happened. And yet, you feel miserable and out of control anyway. This feeling as if you are going crazy is your body’s way of saying, “Go to the doctor, already!”

The Regular Irregular

People with depression, even bipolar disorder, can often hold down jobs, pay bills and appear to live normal lives. They can do this for years until there is an inevitable breakdown. But even after a breakdown, they can very often go back to appearing to live a normal life.

But are depressives abnormal? Not really. Of course, I can’t peek into the thoughts of every single person on the planet, but many people (no matter what their mental health) will often feel bad in some way. They will often feel as if people knew who they really are, then no one would like them. The only difference in depressives is that this thought can become so obsessive, it takes away all of the joys of life.

People with depression often are far more sensitive to picking up the unspoken emotions of others. Even if they live alone, they can often pick up the vibe of the nieghborhood, or sense how people really feel just from talking to them on the phone. So, things were a wee bit tense around the Greater Philadelphia area (where I live) this past couple of weeks because the Phillies were in the World Series.

How I Did My Part

I do my part for Philadelphia sports teams by not watching them. I haven’t watched a single second of the Phillies 2008 season — and they wind up winning the World Series. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they won the World Series in 1980 and I watched nearly every game. (Yes — I am old). However, this is Philadelphia. Logic need not apply as to why the Phillies have a good or bad season.

The Night Air

Mom and I watched MSNBC while the game went on last night about a half hour away from where we live. Just before 10pm, the fireworks started. Mom said, “The Phillies!” but she has trouble walking now, so she switched the channels while I went outside with my dog, Pony.

Out in the night air, even over the fireworks, Pony barking and car honkings, were cheers. It wasn’t just my neighborhood yelling, it wasn’t just the town next door yelling — it was the whole city of Philadelphia yelling, too. It was great to loose myself in the moment when most of the area was finally happy rather than our usual shade of miserable. A couple of years ago, Philadelphia was voted “America’s Most Depressed City”. Not this year, baby.

The Moral Of The Story

If you have any type of depression, it can be too intense of an experience to follow a sports team. If it gives you happiness, then by all means go for it. But for some people like me, I get too personally involved. Suddenly, if my team isn’t winning, then the sky is falling. Part of this I think is because I can pick up on the emotions of all other fans when they are disappointed.

So, I stopped following sports teams. But if you have depression and your town’s sports team does well, go outside and join the parade or listen to the cheers in the biting cold night. It sure beats shock therapy.

In the afterward, Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel writes, “As I found myself saying to not a few people that they found the book angering an annoying to read: Good. Very good: That means I did what I had set out to do.”

It’s too bad that couldn’t have been in the introduction.

It Sucks

The list of just why this book sucks is as long as my arm, but I’ll boil it down to the basics. First off, the title is incredibly misleading. The full title is Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. What impression does that give you? Especially since it’s non-fiction? By using the word “nation”, the title suggests that the book is a look at many American’s battles with depression — not just one freaked out chick.

No Face I Recognize

Some people with depression have enjoyed this book, partly because they claim that they can identify with uberbitch Wurztel. I’ve had clinical depression sice the womb and I do not see much of anything familiar in the shattered mirror of Wurztel’s ravings, tortured love life and moans. You just want to smack her. Heck, I STILL want to smack her.

It takes her 195 pages of self-obsession before she starts to make any kind of a point (and then completely fails to do so.) When you think she’s onto a point, she suddenly changes her mind and champions another point, which she then drops by the end of the book.

The point of the book is that there is no point.

Huh?

If you’re looking for any help on how to deal with your own depression, steer clear from Prozac Nation. It will only make you feel more depressed than ever. The book hints that there is no hope for people with atypical depression, sice she both tears apart talk therapy and praises it. She also does the same for Prozac, lithium and just about any other drug that popped up in her life.

If she wanted to just portray what it’s like to like with depression, she could have done it in a few pages instead of taking 195 out of a 368 page book just to go over the most boring pints of her life. She’s actually had a very interesting life, but skims over anything remotely interesting. For example, she casually mentions in one sentence that she interviewed Joni Mitchell. But then she spends chapters about lying in bed staring at the ceiling wondering why her boyfriend never calls. Screw that — I want to know about what it was like to interview Joni Mitchell.

A much better book about what depression is like and how to get through it is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.

One of the biggest things that can intensify symptoms of depression is the thought that everything is pointless because we’re all going to die. Even more fun is the thought that the universe will eventually die. That means nothing is lasting and therefore everything we do will evenutally become meaningless because it will all fade into oblivion.

Don’t Ignore It

If you start talking about death and how everything is pointless, everyone around you either assumes you are going to commit suicide or they tell you to think about something else. Although many people who do commit suicide (or try to) do talk about death beforehand, they usually talk about the act of death itself, such as “What do think is less painful? Drowning or a gunshot to the head?”

But you do need to look at the fact that you are going to die, whether you have been diagnosed with depression or not. If you keep pushing it away, it becomes part of the Great Unknown and can become far more frightening than it really needs to be. True, no one knows for sure or has 100% proof of what happens to your consciousness and sense of self after you die. You could come back in another body, you could go to an invisible place or you could dissolve into nothingness.

Either of these happenings are really not that bad, once you really think long and hard about them. Studies show that at the moment of death, the body relseases a lot of happy drugs (endorphines) into the system. Everyone may wind up shuffling off of this mortal coil high as a kite. The next life could be a prolonged happy hallucination that seemingly stretches to infinity. That’s not such a bad fate.

In The Meantime

In the meantime, life is like attending a concert with your favorite singer. Sure, there’s a heck of a long wait before the singer comes on and you have to sit through opening acts, but at least, eventually, the singer shows up and performs a great gig. It would be silly wasting that opportunity dreading the moment when the singer takes his final bow and leaves the stage. You want to get as much enjoyment of the concert as you can while you’re there.

Hope this helps.

Okay, I’ll ‘fess up front — the “depression cooking” is not what to cook when you are depressed or what to cook when you want to make someone depressed, it was hot, simple to make filling meals from the era of The Great Depression. My Gandmother passed some reciepes to my Mom, but they’ve mostly been forgotten. However, we have 91 year old Clara to remind us.

I find it hard to believe that Clara is now 92 (91 when this video was made in 2007). She looks better than I do. She certainly can wield a cooking knife a lot better than I do. If you can’t slice an onion and peel a potato like she can, please put the foody thing on a chopping board and slice away from you. Place the food item to be chopped on the board, and slice it in half as best you can. Then, cut those halves in halves. Keep repeating and you have a slightly safer way to dice and slice.

Clara’s YouTube cooking series, “Depression Cooking with Clara” has a lot that can help people with depression, including major depression:

• Cooking is creating: Being able to cook yourself a meal is a great accomplishment, especially when you’re depressed and either feel overwhelmed with figuring out what to make for dinner or eat too much crap food because it’s already made.
• Cooking is exercise: Every little bit helps.
• Cooking helps ease money fears: Odds are, as we plunge headlong into the next Great Depression, you don’t have much money. It’s good to not only see what you can make with inexpensive ingredients, but also good to hear how other survived the first Great Depression and now laugh about it.

Hope this helps.

Just as you don’t want to drink alcohol when your depression symptoms are really kicking up, it’s also not adivesable to watch a really depressing movie. You really don’t need anything to intensify your symptoms. Granted, some depressives can watch a depressing movie and not feel any worse, they usually feel any better, either. If you are experincing one of those setbacks where one more thing is going to push you over the edge, then avoid watching depressing movies.

What Constitutes A Depressing Movie?

Granted, you probably have a different definition of what a really depressing movie is. When I refer to a depressing movie, I’m talking abut a movie where you really get to know and pull for the good duys and it looks like they’re going to save the day and then they loose big time. Critics usually refer to these movies as “gritty slices of reality” but they are as depressing as the current economic crisis.

The List

Here we go. Brace yourself. I’m only keeping this to five because I know that when depression symptoms flare up it can be hard to concentrate.

• 5) Birdy (1984) Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack is much more inspiring than the film. Peter describes this as a “very special film”, but I’m not sure if he was being sarcastic. (As in, “You’re being sent to the special education classes.”) This is one of those films where at the end, you shake your head and say, “What the hell just happened?”
• 4) Sophie’s Choice (1982) Granted, any movie involving a Nazi concentration camp should give you a clue that this isn’t going to be a day at the beach. Although incredibly beautiful to look at and has great acting, the ending makes you wonder if everything in life is pointless.
• 3) Platoon (1986) Ditto. What’s even more depressing is that last week on MSNBC, director Oliver Stone commented, “I made three movies about the Vietnam War and it didn’t stop us from doing it again in Iraq.”
• 2) Dances With Wolves (1990) I used to be in an abusive realtionship. Knowing full well I was part Native American, my partner forced me to watch this movie. It was either that or get beat up. I think I would’ve been better off getting beaten up. Thankfully, I finally wised up and left him.
• 1) Brazil (1985). Wanting to watch this movie voluntarily more than once in a lifetime is a definite sign that you may be thinking suicidal thoughts.

If you know of any other movies those with depression should avoid, feel free to comment below.

With two useless wars in progress and no end in sight, the economy in a mess, health care at an all time low, good guys loosing and bad guys winning, it should not be a suprize to anyone that more Americans are killing themselves. For the first time in a decade, the suicide rates in America have gone up instead of down. The group with the most alarming rise in suicides are middle aged white women, according to a new intesive survey published in the October 21 edition of The American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

Roll Out The Numbers

The leader of the study was Susan P. Baker of Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Health. Basically, a lot of numbers were crunched lookiong at American suicides from 1999 -2005. Baker notes right away that although we know the skin color, gender and age of the people who commit suicides, we really don’t know what was the final deciding factor or factors that lead to them killing themselves.

Some specific numbers now, all for the years 1999-2005:

• American suicides rose by 0.7%
• Suicides of middle aged white men rose 2.7%
• Sucides of middle aged white women rose 3.9%

Although shooting yourself continues to be the most popular way of offing yourself, poisioning accounted for 18% of suicides and suffocation or strangulation is becoming more popular, rising grasually in both men and women.

A Particular Instance

I don’t think it should be any big mystery as to why more Americans are killing themselves. Just look at what happened to 90 year old Addie Polk of Akron, Ohio. As her home was being foreclosed upon, she shot herself in the chest. Because someone was right there, Polk got immediate medical care. Eventually, Fannie Mae said, “Ahh, never mind. Let her keep her home.” What’s a 90 year old without any family going to do on the street? It is unknown whether Polk will survive her self-inflicted gunshot wound.

One theory as to why more middle aged white Americans are killing themselves is that they have been raised to expect nothing of the best from themselves and to be a failure is unforgiveable.

What About Native Americans?

There’s a lot of fuss over white American sucides, but there’s never been much fuss about the high rates of suicide among other skin colors, especailly among Native Americans (you know — the ones who should really be in power and have been treated like crap since 1492?). The latest study notes that Asians and Native American sucide rates were “stable”, but Native Americans had the highest sucide rate in America in 1979 - 1992.

No one gave a rat’s ass then. But now it’s white people dying and suddenly mainstream American is concerned.

No wonder we’re depressed! I’m both white and Native American, so I’m my own worst enemy.

The full title is Medical Myths That Can Kill You And the 101 Truths That Will Save, Extend and Improve Your Life and it’s gotten a lot of buzz this year. The author, Dr. Nancy L Snyderman is one of those “TV doctors” — a real doctor but also is the Chief Medical Editor for NBC News. This book covers all aspects of health care, but does have one section devoted to mental health care.

Myth #7 You Can Just Snap Out of Mental Illness

Sadly, this is the shortest section of the book at a mere 35 pages long, but echoes of caring for your mental health can be seen in previous sections such as “Myth #6 — Natural Means “Safe”" and “Myth #1 — Annual Checkups Are Obselete.” This section focuses on Dr. Snyderman’s personal story — and quite frankly gives a little too much information about her past battles with depression brought on when she was raped in 1969.

However, there are a lot of other tips and supportive sugggestions for anyone battling any kind of mental illness, including depression. She also notes that depression can be brought on by suddenly developing a chronic painful illness or disease. She notes that for the patient to get any relief, they not only need treatment for their physical problems, but for their emotional, as well.

Some Quibbles

Every now and then Dr. Snyderman does address that the current health care system in America is dysfunctional, available only to the rich and filled with incompetant doctors. Although not completely ignoring the problem, her best advice is to just accept that the health system is unfair and get another doctor or therapist if you don’t like the one you have.

Unfortunately, that’s not a realistic alternative for many people. I remember the time when I waws homeless in England and was only allowed to visit the doctors who volunteered to come to Bath’s homeless shelter, Julian House. Although I got along with all of the doctors there, I was lucky. How about if I didn’t? It’s not as if I could choose.

That happens also in America, to not only the homeless but also to the middle class. Because of Medicaid or health insurance restrictions, they may have a whopping one doctor or one therapist to choose from. That’s not acceptable.

Just in case you were wondering, there isn’t really an official Catholic patron saint of depression — but there is one for mental ilness. Since depression is considered a mental illness, this is about as close to we’re going to get. Although I’m not Catholic, I love to learn about mythology. It’s also good to know how other cultures perceive your depression.

And despite St. John’s Wort being touted as a nautral antidepressant, the herb was not given its name because St. John had anythign to do with depression. The herb got the name because it bloomed around St. John’s Feast Day (also known as Midsummer).

Say Hello to Saint Dympna

St. Dympna had the twisted and tragic life that typifies the more interesting of the Catholic Saints. Since she is supposed to have lived in the 600s in Ireland, it can’t be proven whether she really lived or not. However, most myths are based in reality, so it’s highly possible that Dympna was either based on an old long-lost Celtic myth or from a real person. She’s also known as Dymphna and Davnet.

Dympna was not the one who had the mental illness. It was her father Damon, a Pagan leader of some sort. (As a Pagan myself, I won’t take offence). After her mother (a Christian) died, Dympna’s father ordered her to wed him. Well, like the good Catholic Saint she’d be, she refused the admittedly creepy thought of having her marry her Dad, so she took off for parts unknown with the help of her Christian priest.

She and the male priest ran off to Antwerp and did tons of miracles to help the sick and the poor. There’s appraently nothing in the story about anyone raising their eyebrows at the sight of a lone, nubile young female travelling with a male in a priest’s uniform. Sure he was her priest. Right.

Anyway, Dad Damon catches up with the pair and beheads them. End of story.

Death Becomes Her

Dympna apprently has had a busy time of it after her head and her body parted ways. She’s not only the patron siant of mental illnesses, but also of epilepsy, sleepwalking and posessed people. Oddly enough, serotonin is thought to play a part not only in depression and epilespsy, but also migraines (which definitely make you feel possessd).

Either that or bitchy Dympna causes all of the problems because she had a bad childhood.

I nearly dropped my tea when I read this. As readers of any of my blogs know I lived many years in south England before moving back to the land of my birth — the suburbs of Philadelphia. I met many UK natives and naturalized citizens with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder. They all seemed to have nothing but derision and scorn for talk therapy but seemed more than eager to try any new medication that came along.

I guess they pulled one over on me and whoever was listening, because the British Association for Counsellling and And Psychotherapy claim that UK citizens prefer talk therapy or cognitive behaviorial therapy than they do taking any kind of medications. Granted, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy may have a vested interest to crow about this as loud as they can, even though they are not a business guild but a charity. Which leads to the inevitable question –

How Reliable Can This Study Be?

Although the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy are the publishers of the study, Counselling in primary care: a systematic review of the evidence, they don’t appear to be the folks who funded the study. There doesn’t seem to be any major pharmaceutical company or profession with a vested interest funding the study.

BUT (and yes, it’s a big but) the British government has just invested a whopping 170 million pounds over three years into funding a government program called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies. Although I do beleive that both medication and therapy helped me and can helps lots of other folks with major depression or post-natal depression, I do grit my teeth to see whenever I see that money may somehow be the sole motive of a depression treatment study. The reason I grit my teeth is that I know someone will point at the study and say, “Money is invloved, therefore the study is worthless and therefore let’s let those with depression tough it out on their own so we can fight more wars.”

The Study Itself

The study was done by Andrew Hill, Alison Prettle and Peter Jenkins from the University of Salford. They study also contains contributions by Claire Hulme from the University of Leeds. They claim that 24% of their patients wanted only counselling while only 15% wanted counselling. However, the majority of patients (61%) was far more sensible and wanted both.

Talk therapy definitely is not on the way out – in the UK, at least.

Although you’re an intelligent lot, Gentle Readers, I do want to point out that you should never combine Xanax and wine — unless it’s in a song title.

This video was a labor of love, since U2 never made an official video for this song. So, what “U2’sBiggestFan” did is take clips from other U2 videos, turn it all black and white and make a spiffy intro. I think it works really well. But, even if you’re not fond of the video, you can always just shut your eyes and listen to it.

Bono must be no stranger to depression, if the lyrics are any indication, including this highlight:

You should worry ’bout the pain
That the pain will go away
You know, I miss mine sometimes

Vintage.

What is Xanax?

Xanax (spelled the same backwards as forwards) is the best known brand name for alprazolam, which is part of the benzodiazepine family. This is heavy-duty stuff and not to be taken just for the heck of it. If you are diagnosed with depression, your doctor or therapist will usually start you off with a milder medicine like Prozac before prescribing this stuff.

Xanax is especially good at helping people with panic attacks or contant anxiety. Sometimes, it’s also prescribed for people in the throws of post traumatic stress disorder. Xanax helps the furniture feel a lot more comfortable and helps you to get regular sleep. For some people, it also increases their appetite. My Mom is prescribed Xanax and has never claimed to get high off of it. Of course, she probably wouldn’t know what gettign high feels like, except for perhaps one time when she misread the directions on a bottle of cough syrup and giggled for about eight hours straight.

Go to school. Hate it. Get a job. Hate it. Pay the bills. Hate it. Then perhaps have a few years of retirement where you finally have time for what you want to do, but can’t because of the problems of an aging body. So, you spend 99.9% doing what you don’t want to do and .01% of what you do want to do.

Is this all there is to life? No wonder there are so many people with major depression. And if you already have major depression or are on the down cycle of bipolar disorder, then looking at everyday life and back over your own life and the life of your parents can make you want to curl up under the covers and never some back out.

There Is More To Life

Although it might sound incredible, there is far more to life than holding down a steady job and making a lot of money. But if you have major depression (or any other type of depression), you won’t be able to see all of the other ingredients that up the minnestrone soup of life. This is because the depression is like an eyelash across your eyeball — it hurts so that you can’t see much of anything.

So, first off, you need to try and get better. Leave the heavy “meaning of life” questions for later. The more you try and find them now, the more of a hole you’ll dig yourself into. When you have depression, you can’t sleep well and are more prone to illnesses and can’t concentrate. You need to let yourself have the luxury of taking the time to get better before you can start butting neads with Christopher Hitchens and/or the Dalai Lama.

It Finds You

Finding some sort of point to life — even finding a job that doesn’t want to make you vomit — takes a long time to find. Some people are born knowing exactly what they want to do in life and then there’s the other 99% of us. If you get your health in order, and then tend to making sure you get enough food and a roof over your head, the heavy duty questions of life seem to answer themselves.

One day, you stumble upon what you want to do with your life, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with money. Maybe it’s doing charity work or pursuing creative arts (which don’t pay well, believe me). Somehow, it finds you when you’re not really looking to hard for it.

Hope this helps.

First, an electronic magnetic device was approved for headache treatment and now there’s a big fuss in the blogosphere about using a similar kind of magnetic doo-hickey for treatment of clinical depression. It’s been approved by the U.S Federal Drug Administration for depressives. So, what’s this thing supposed to treat next? The common cold? The war in Iraq?

What Is It?

The super-duper name for it is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? The good news is that thee doesn’t seem to be any negative side effects. The bad news is that it can’t possibly work in the long term. Short term, yes — but not long term.

Granted, I’m not a doctor nor a therapist. I do, however, have a brain and use it regularly(despite my many years in Christian education). Magnetic therapy does seem to help people and animals for some sports-related aches and pains, and does have some traditional folk healing properties (including migraine treatment) — but nowhere in myth, folk healing or even urban legends have there been any indications that magnets help depression or melancholia.

The Placebo Effect

Although the makers of this doo-hickey, Neuronetics, Inc., claim they have done clinical testing with 164 deressives proving the benefits of TMS to patients with major depression, I can’t help but wonder what the time period of these tests were. The placebo effect will inevitably last for the first few months. This is because if you believe it, it will come. If you believe a new doo-hickey will help cure you, you will feel cured. The mind is an incredibly powerful thing. It can be duped for bad reasons as well as for good reasons.

However, major depression is a life-long affliction which has to be battled every single darn day. It’s not merely a problem of brain chemicstry, but ingrained thinking habits learned over years. If major depression was only a physcial problem, then it should have been wiped out as soon as Prozac and his kin hit the market.

The thing about TMS that I distrust is that there isn’t any mention of treating the long-ingrained learned helplessness apparant in many with major depression. Also, how much is this thing? That’s GOT to be depressing!

If the US government could be eager to spend over $700 billion for the recent economic bailout, they probably won’t blink at the mere $2 million that a soldier’s widow wants for her soldier husband’s 2006 suicide. The suit charges that the Veteran’s Administration branch overseeing the soldier’s treatment had been negligent, ignoring the soldier and leaving him to his own devices.

This is precisely the wrong thing to do with someone showing signs of major depression, since they are prone to harming themselves. Personally, I’ve survived more botched suicide attempts than I care to admit.

RIP Donald Woodward

Donald Woodward was born in Indiana and later moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (yes, that Lancaster). His story is becoming all-too-familiar among veterans. He went to Iraq, admitted to having to kill three people in combat, was discharged, came back home, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (shell shock) and major depression, given Zoloft, refused to go back to the VA and then soon he shot himself. He was 23.

The suit alleges that Woodward’s wife repeatedly called the VA to let them know that he was becoming more and more depressed. She also said that her husband was refusing to get any kind of treatment whatsoever and she thinks he stopped taking the Zoloft. The VA basically said, “Gee, that’s tough, but if he won’t come here voluntarily, there’s nothing we can do.” (Keep in mind that we don’t know the VA’s side of the story.)

Zoloft and Suicide

Any antidepressant can backfire and make you even more miserable than you were before. This writer counts herself lucky that fluoxetine (Prozac) works really well with my body and I haven’t tried to kill myself since first taking it.

Zoloft seems to have bad luck in being prescribed to people who can’t tolerate it, but nowhere near as bad as Paxil, which made a lot of headlines over lawsuits from bereaved families of those who took it and then committed suicide. Zoloft is no longer prescribed to people under 18 and some doctors think it shouldn’t be given to anyone under 25. Some other doctors think that’s a load of hooey and that if a milder anitdepressant doesn’t help, the next logical step is a more powerful one.

Anyone taking a new antidepressant has to be closely supervised for worsening behavior. It will be interesting to see what the results of this lawsuit will be.