Would anecdotes help? My sister is bipolar, and medication has helped her immensely. My wife had a pretty bad bout of anxiety / depression that pretty much tanked two years until I convinced her to try some medication - a year of it helped get her over the edge, and she's off and doing much better.
Now I'll proceed to shoot somewhere near my foot, maybe hitting it :) I'd rather be understood and disagreed with than misunderstood and have fake happiness. And I would honestly be curious what your take is on this, I obviously haven't experienced everything there is in the world. There's no hard feelings here, I've seen that stance before, and I hate it too. It does indeed prevent people from getting help.
My main view with anything that tweaks your brain is that your brain is enormously flexible. Barring issues where you're not making enough / too much of a certain chemical (ie, largely genetic), you quite literally did this to yourself (as bad as that sounds). Your life habits have caused you to get stuck in the loop of depression / anxiety, and it builds on itself, pretty frequently until it controls you unless you are lucky enough to find a way to break out before then. Or someone drags you out. Drugs help get you out of that loop, but if your habits don't change you'll train your brain to go back to where it was in spite of the drugs (and this happens, it's not just dualism / zomg-natural-only. That's part of what causes psychological addictions, and depression is highly addictive). Again, unless there's a more permanent biological problem - then you're using drugs to reach normalcy, which is where your body / brain wants to be anyway. But enforced normalcy while you keep pulling yourself away from it is doomed to failure and high costs.
There are plenty of cases of, say, insufficient dopamine production due to genetics. And cases where depression / anxiety have caused chemical imbalances (ie: nearly all, especially severe cases). And the existence of medications to help that is utterly wonderful. But using drugs to ignore a problem isn't a solution. To solve a problem, yes, but that's not how many (possibly most) people use them, in part because of how quickly these medications are leapt at. Can't focus? Try hyperactivity drugs. Can't sleep? Try sleep aids. Can't be happy? Try antidepressants. Therapy, on the other hand, gets nowhere near as much medical support, despite similar success rates and often longer-term solutions. It has plenty of failures as well, everyone's different and there are plenty of bad therapists out there; I'm merely saying that it gets far less support than drugs do.
OK, we're getting dangerously nuanced now, which breaks all the rules of the Internet.
I think you're conflating the illusion of consciousness with the brain itself. It is possible to take actions to intervene in my own neurochemistry -- I am a self-observing system. I can avoid situations that upset me, I can spend more time with friends and family, and so on.
But my personal experience of depression is that it removes the will to be cured. Yes, you can seek therapy, spend time with friends, take up meditation and these will help. But when you are depressed even the thought of getting help is ... exhausting. A cause for dismay, even. It is a particularly invidious disease.
Each of us has different systemic set points for our internal processes -- dynamic equilibria which our systems drift to over time. Most of these are necessary and useful, they keep us alive. But some of us have set points with unpleasant side-effects. Some people have trouble regulating blood sugar, and they use exogenous insulin to do it manually. I have trouble regulating serotonin, and I use sertraline hydrochloride to influence it manually.
High doses broke the back of a depressive episode that lasted 5 years. Low doses have kept me functioning since then.
Is it perfect? No. I could do without the side-effects, but I expect that as time goes on these drugs will become more specific and effective. Or someone will come up with a gene therapy. Who knows?
I do not regard what I experience as fake happiness. It is as real as anybody else's.
I'm not claiming it's fake happiness. You've clearly made it work for you. I'm merely saying that many people expect drug X to solve all their problems, because it makes them feel better, and do nothing to solve the root problems (which will come back in time). Maybe not most, but even a small percentage means hundreds of thousands of people, and tons of kids who have no choice in the matter.
>it removes the will to be cured
Absolutely, that's why it's such a hard thing to fix. And drugs are a fantastic way to crack your way out of it, to break that relentless loop. And our current culture sneers at anyone (particularly men) seeking help to solve personal problems. That needs to change. It is, slightly, thankfully, but there's a very long way to go.
I take no issue with medicating. Only over-medicating. And neurochemical-manipulating drugs have been crammed down America's collective throat for a while now, without long-term trials, frequently with barely-detectable improvements over sugar pills (and later studies showing none or worse), and without really understanding what they're doing or their ramifications.
Not that I think that's surprising. It's a powerful, successful-enough new line of treatment that's helping a lot of people, and exposing a lot of existing problems that are now getting treated. Of course such a thing would be used before long-term trials were run. People would take it voluntarily - the immediate almost always out-weighs the long-term in any creature, but it's entirely founded when the immediate threatens your life.
The problem I find with the current everyone-must-be-happy trend (as nice as it would be to achieve) is that a) it adds more weight against those who are unhappy to conceal their problems rather than publicly seek help, as everyone else is clearly happy (ignoring the truth) and they don't want to cause unhappiness, and b) it has lead to over-prescribing short-term (in that they work quickly, not that they don't continue to work - that's debatable and essentially unknown currently) solutions, when the causes are the real demons that must be exorcised. It is masking the problems because people quit dealing with them because a fast way out is a doctor's visit and a complaint away. Which is their fault for being lazy, but that's human (and efficient), and it shouldn't be that readily handed out or advertised as a magic bullet.
It also doesn't help that hyperactivity drugs have been pushed by elementary schools (or individual teachers) for unruly kids when it's far more likely that they are bored or weren't raised properly. But that's a rant about our education system, which (especially at elementary levels) I feel is fundamentally, enormously flawed and contributing to a lot of problems. I won't go further on that.
What needs to be done is to treat the imminent danger, and then immediately work with people to solve the causes. But that's cross-discipline - medication and (essentially) psychotherapy - thus rare in a single person, and because the initial danger is gone people quit trying. It appears to be a solution, without actually being one, and long-term / long-term-use side-effects are very real and very dangerous, and largely unknown. One of which I do feel is that it teaches people to medicate their problems instead of dealing with them directly. It's encouraging people to take fast exits.
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Anecdote time! I had a couple years of depression a while back, and didn't take anything for it. I was lucky enough to find a way out of it before I got wholly stuck, and I'm incredibly aware of how close I was to getting stuck and how powerful the loop is - that realization is what shocked me out of it. I'm a minority in that, and I know I was lucky, not strong-willed or somehow better.
Once I got out of the loop, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was back to normal, so I just kept doing what was working. Drugs could likely have shortened it, but I'm leery of drugging my brain after trying various sleeping aids left me hung over and brain-dead for good chunks of that year. It's not entirely rational, and I fully admit it, but I think I made the right choice for me. The process of fixing it has improved me, as I work at fixing things much sooner now.
And if that's rambly, apologies! I'm sort of rambly-feeling right now, and this touches on a lot of areas so it's hard to make cohesive.
Now I'll proceed to shoot somewhere near my foot, maybe hitting it :) I'd rather be understood and disagreed with than misunderstood and have fake happiness. And I would honestly be curious what your take is on this, I obviously haven't experienced everything there is in the world. There's no hard feelings here, I've seen that stance before, and I hate it too. It does indeed prevent people from getting help.
My main view with anything that tweaks your brain is that your brain is enormously flexible. Barring issues where you're not making enough / too much of a certain chemical (ie, largely genetic), you quite literally did this to yourself (as bad as that sounds). Your life habits have caused you to get stuck in the loop of depression / anxiety, and it builds on itself, pretty frequently until it controls you unless you are lucky enough to find a way to break out before then. Or someone drags you out. Drugs help get you out of that loop, but if your habits don't change you'll train your brain to go back to where it was in spite of the drugs (and this happens, it's not just dualism / zomg-natural-only. That's part of what causes psychological addictions, and depression is highly addictive). Again, unless there's a more permanent biological problem - then you're using drugs to reach normalcy, which is where your body / brain wants to be anyway. But enforced normalcy while you keep pulling yourself away from it is doomed to failure and high costs.
There are plenty of cases of, say, insufficient dopamine production due to genetics. And cases where depression / anxiety have caused chemical imbalances (ie: nearly all, especially severe cases). And the existence of medications to help that is utterly wonderful. But using drugs to ignore a problem isn't a solution. To solve a problem, yes, but that's not how many (possibly most) people use them, in part because of how quickly these medications are leapt at. Can't focus? Try hyperactivity drugs. Can't sleep? Try sleep aids. Can't be happy? Try antidepressants. Therapy, on the other hand, gets nowhere near as much medical support, despite similar success rates and often longer-term solutions. It has plenty of failures as well, everyone's different and there are plenty of bad therapists out there; I'm merely saying that it gets far less support than drugs do.