MemeMachineGo!

Eliot of Follow Me Here is a psychiatrist, and one the the best things about his (even otherwise superlative) blog is his commentary on mental health issues. Recently, he wrote about the modern use of anti-depressants.

The smiling faces of recovered patients in the ads are false promises that these are 'happy pills' that can take away our troubles. Instead, as I explain to my patients, what the medications do is more akin to Freud's famous dictum about the goal of psychoanalysis being to turn neurotic unhappiness into ordinary, everyday unhappiness. If someone has something to be distressed about, they'll usually still be distressed about it after antidepressant therapy. In fact, they may be more distressed about it, i.e. more able to feel their distress, and certainly more able to function in the face of such distress. I often analogize medication to a bicycle — it'll get you where you need to get faster and more efficiently than walking, but you still need to do the pedalling.