Word: suffering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand several fundamental facts about psychiatric disorders and medications. Antidepressants—that is, serotonin and serotonin-norepenephrine reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs and SNRIs—relieve symptoms of clinical depression by balancing levels of certain chemicals in the brain. Psychiatrists believe that if a person who does not suffer from clinical depression—that is, who has healthy brain chemistry—were to take an antidepressant, he would experience any number of negative side effects while not getting any benefit from the medication...
...away; a person whose brain chemistry is balanced (with or without the aid of medication) feels sad, even miserable—just not hopeless or suicidal for months or years on end. (Thus, the argument that antidepressants eliminate great art is not only incredibly selfish—let others suffer so that I may look at paintings!— it is misinformed: even if suffering does enable the production of profound literature or heartrending symphonies, antidepressants do not by any means eliminate suffering...
...only would people who don’t suffer from depression (which is the disorder most discussed in the context of these debates) not experience any benefit from taking this type of medication, but they might experience any number of these medications’ undesirable side effects, which include insomnia, constipation, diarrhea, muscle pain, increased sweatiness, nausea, constant fatigue, extreme weight gain, memory loss, decreased sexual desire, and inability to orgasm. (Let people who question the reality of depression note that people who take antidepressants decide that living with these pretty awful side effects is better than living with depression...
...that it is an illness. As much as drug companies have been criticized for advertising their medications to the general public, we must acknowledge that the increased awareness of mental illness these ads have generated have had the positive effect of getting information about treatments to those who may suffer from mental illness. All of this misinformed and ignorant talk of drug companies turning Americans into unthinking pill-popping drones runs the very serious risk of discouraging those same people from seeking the help they so desperately need...
...past, she says, "family was always the most important thing. It would never have entered my mind to separate." Still, thanks to her children, she's become more accustomed to the idea of divorce. "They're adults," she says. "If two people are unhappy, why should they have to suffer...