Medication Shaming?

I was recently on the Do The Thing podcast with the amazing Melissa Hartwig Urban discussing diet and lifestyle approaches to treating depression. Melissa got a comment about shaming people for taking meds. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

This is such an important, delicate, nuanced issue. I of course would never shame anybody for anything, let alone for taking a medication as an act to take care of themselves and treat their mental illness. But I 100% get how someone could “hear” shaming when I say the key to treating depression is not just about serotonin and taking medication. In the act of offering people a different way of looking at depression, and additional tools beyond medication, it can be heard as a judgment of the approach of taking medications. It’s not. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with taking psych meds. My concerns are: a) medications don’t actually help everybody; b) many people experience side effects such as decreased libido, digestive issues, weight gain, or even a blunting of affect when on meds, and those effects need to be balanced with the benefits, c) meds are not as efficacious as we’re lead to believe; and d) we have a lack of informed consent around the fact that medications can be difficult to get off of, so that information should be part of the conversation when we’re starting meds. It’s important to point out, if someone is on meds and it’s working for them and helping with their depression, that’s great news! No need to do anything differently. My concern is for the millions of people for whom our conventional mental health treatments aren’t meeting their needs. For those folks out there, I want to offer you other tools and approaches for addressing your illness and empowering you to feel well in your lives.