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That's what freaks me out about these drugs. You-on-the-pill becomes you, and you can't ever stop.

Sorry, I don't mean to second-guess your choices. There's clearly some very interesting issues here, and my experience is as someone who never felt they had any serious issues with mental health. But I do think that we have this culture where everyone is expected to be OK all the time. Do you worry at all that your son cues in to his parents relationship with the drug? I mean, say it was me, and I knew my parents took a pill so that they could "have a good day" but they didn't give me the have-a-good-day pill. I would think (perhaps subconsciously) that if I was having a bad day the drug could have made it into a good one. Having a bad day would be medical now, a reason to feel like you're sick or broken.
Prozac doesn't define me. It's just something I take to address a health condition, like an iron supplement for low iron levels or amoxicillin for strep throat. My kids learned about it because they saw me taking a pill every day and asked what it was. No biggie.

To be clear, Prozac is not a "feel-good" pill, it's a "gradually feel more stable" pill. It makes my lows less debilitatingly low and more manageable -- my lows are now largely logical responses to difficult events, as opposed to randomly happening for no reason at all. The effect is very gradual and subtle: you can't really evaluate it until after several weeks, and then the "evaluation" is a conversation about whether your affect has seemed generally more stable recently. An average person taking Prozac would probably notice no effect at all, good or bad. By contrast, a stimulant like Adderrall will have a noticeable effect on anyone within minutes.

My son never asked for Prozac or for a "feel-good" pill. My kids have heard of addiction before so we've talked about pills that do make you feel good and why they're dangerous, and also "dopamine drips" like brainrot on YouTube.

That's fair. Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
IMO, that's a common misconception. The fact that it seems this way can be attributed misunderstanding, bias in data, and perhaps a poor treatment choice. Sometimes, it's also the best healthcare can do for now.

Medical interventions for mental health issues aren't a forever-crutch. Plenty of people do taper off/change something about their prescriptions after a certain point, but we rarely ever hear those stories. What we do hear is plenty of people getting on meds/being on meds for a long time, which can bias us and make us think that most people who get on meds are on it for life.

well when the you-off-the-pill wants to kill yourself, becoming you-on-the-pill is a pretty rad thing
Such a simple concept, and for some reason so difficult to grasp for certain people. Usually the ones not coming across as particularly empathetic or open-minded.
I suppose the "good" news is that is just how life goes. Conceptually similar comparison to someone who is hungry and someone who isn't - the tendency towards snapishness is definitely there. Who someone is becomes unstable of long stretches of time (unless they are very boring), it results more from the present conditions that involve them than anything else.

The main issue with drugs is they are more likely to have unexpected or socially harmful side effects than most things.

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