I've been living with treatment resistant depression for the majority of my lifetime. I would explain it away as just my bi-polar, a little bit of life circumstances, or due to the season. These things contribute, yet I now think it's far more complex than I believed it was, or perhaps it is better to say as I'd been led to believe due to the treatment I received throughout life.

This year has been the worst of my life.

I was tired of being so emotionally numb; I no longer had a sense of self, of being alive, so I quit my Mirtazapine cold turkey. Things went from bad to worse, to terrible, to...there's no way to accurately express what this past year was like. It was bad.

However, I'm no longer depressed, without an anti-depressant. Diet, exercise, sleep, reducing stress, taking supplements which attenuate my stress response, doing everything but relying on medication was enough to get me here.

After all of my research I now understand why this year was so bad. It was withdrawal symptoms from a psychotropic medication my brain had become dependant upon and chronic stress.

I'm not saying anti-depressants cannot help, but their efficacy is unreliable and my experience is that they have never been enough on their own. I place far more importance now on all the other things which can be done to address depression than the potentially destructive and destabilizing administration of anti-depressants.

I cannot emphasize that enough. By doing what I did I was able to reduce the depth of my depression while in withdrawal from Mirtazapine and Temazepam, after having suffered a concussion, and while continually haunted by how depressing my life is in itself. Even now I have to be careful about thinking too deeply about how little there is in my life. There's this big crushing pit of loss and despair I'm afraid of revisiting. I still have yet to work through the issues which it arises from. I am certainly not happy, but I know I'm not depressed in a way which requires psychotropics to address.

Effectively treating my depression required a systemic change in lifestyle and perspective; going farther will require even more, but it need not involve an anti-depressant.

To be clear, if anti-depressants are not working for you then pursue alternative solutions. Everyone is different, so it is upon yourself to find out what works.

I don't want to misled anyone into thinking there is any easy answer or that finding answers must necessarily be hard. It us just the one thing I am truly certain of at this point is that Psychiatrists don't have answers, they have pills, sketchy research data, and lots of maybe's (at least the ethical ones do).