On my internet wanderings today I ended up reading some reviews for books on Amazon that looked at the effect of Prozac and other SSRIs. What amazed me was that for every positive review about the books, there was one that warned, in nearly evangelical proportions, about the evils of SSRIs.
Put bluntly, the brain and its chemical composition are hugely complex and vary from individual to individual. It's simply not possible to create a pharmaceutical solution that will suit EVERY sufferer. We had all of this with the Panorama program about Seroxat too. I happened to be taking it at the time, and it worked very well for me, however there are people it didn't work so well for. But this is a fact of life in every part of the pharmaceutical industry, not just in the area of anti-depressants. Anyone put on a drug like this should be done so under supervision of their doctor - if it transpires that it's not effective or causing unwanted side-effects, then the option is there to stop taking it or to try a different drug. Stop the scare-mongering - this is a valuable way to make the quality of living so much better for a huge number of people - but no one is saying, and no one believes that it's 100% fail safe.
In our experience, my partner has now been taking Prozac for 5 months, and certainly at this stage we can say that it has totally changed his situation. Beforehand his depression was quite severe and he was gradually unable to function normally in quite alot of areas of his life - work / social etc. Today he has a part-time job - several other projects on the go, he has resumed a normal social life and can cope with alot of the stresses that life tends to throw one's way. This is a total change from before and for him (and me) life is just so much better. Of course there are still days when he's a bit quieter, or finds things a bit of a struggle, but that's ok - and we both know to expect that. It's given him the breathing space to get back on his feet, and more importantly to be able to look back on the last few years and now see that he really wasn't very well. That's part of the trouble with depression, you don't realise there's anything wrong with YOU, you think it's other people... so now he can see that he wasn't well and now he can start on the road to recovery and getting hislife back on track. Gone are the days of feeling numb about everything - these days he looks forward to various occasions, and feels the whole gamut of emotions that you and I would take for granted. Most days he smiles and laughs - something that I'd almost forgotten he had the capacity to do. Most importantly for me, he now knows that I was always on his side trying to support him. He knows that he is loved and that this is unconditional.
Being the partner of a depressive can be the bleakest and loneliest of places. This blog is about showing that there is hope and there can be recovery - it's also a "diary" of how that progresses - both good and bad. This time last year I would never have believed we could be in the place we are now - I really thought it was hopeless. How wrong I was, and how glad I am to be able to say that!
