There is little research into the long-term effects of using antidepressants
I was also put on antidepressants as a teenager and am trying to get off them after well over a decade. It&#x27;s a tricky task to distinguish the withdrawal effects (which can be extreme) from the difficult emotions that come with rediscovering how to face the world without the drugs. It really feels like a part of my personality was frozen in time when I went on the drugs, and that as I come off them slowly that part of me has thawed. And that can be painful, but also extremely rewarding. It forced me to acknowledge truths about myself that I resisted for many years. It forced me to be more real with people in my life. It&#x27;s the realization that I was depressed for actual emotional reasons and not just because of some putative neurochemical imbalance, the idea of which in such huge numbers makes absolutely no evolutionary sense. A trait this common is not a disorder---it&#x27;s a survival mechanism.