It won't do any good because they are in denial of their part in their current situation. Part of healing is accepting reality --otherwise one is just spinning one's wheels.

For those of you saying that a "drug is a drug," though, it is easy to have that attitude when you are not familiar or do not know someone who has chronic, chemically based depression.
Many people are depressed for a reason(s) and learn to deal with problems and losses, but for many others, it isn't a matter of pulling themselves out of the depths of despair. My mother has battled this type of depression her whole life, and anti-depressants have given her some semblance of normalcy--now that she is 82 and getting a little senile.

To the OP, though, you need to get yourself off the drugs. Losing people whom one loves is something that we all go through. It is never easy, but by taking anti-depressants, you are not even allowing yourself to mourn and grieve for those who are dead. When you start to wean yourself, the pain comes back because you have never dealt with it. - Gwendolyn2006

Organic depression (being depressed
for a reason), is not helped by anti-depressants & it is probably those people who have the most adverse reactions
to them. I mean, think about it. Insulin & digoxin save thousands of lives every year, but they are only save when
prescribed & used properly.

Ok ill ill be the first to admit im on them. It really amazes me how many people are taking them. It makes me feel a bit sad that so many are in need of these drugs. I dont feel ashamed as without them i cry a lot. When my two little sisters died i became an alcoholic and eventually went to detox . Thats when the doc put me on them five years ago. i feel perfectly normal and because i feel so great sometimes ive tried to wean off them. four days after theyre out of my system it starts. All the pain of my sisters and mum and dad dying comes back and im an emotional wreck. How many of you are on them? And how are they going for you?

See Cocytus that's a bit short sighted honestly. Again I agree they are overperscribed, I agree often people are using them for the easy way out.

No antidepressant should be being perscribed however unless someone is working with someone to address their issues.

That said life hasn't grown easier its grown different. In someways it has actually gotten worse in the past 20 or so years its become likely that people will be less well off then their parents and that's almost unheard of in history.

As for the rest of you questions history provides the answers in saddly painful ways. Research sanitariums and bedlam to get your answer.

With the first "great civilization," that of the Ancient Egyptians, came the first signs of change in the treatment of the mentally ill. Egypt, like the early stone-age societies (and indeed most societies for the next 3-and-a-half millennia), regarded mental illness as magical or religious in nature. Egyptian psychiatric theory was deeply rooted in the Egyptian conception of the self – the khat (the body), the ka (one’s guardian spirit, who guides the individual to the afterlife), and the ba (symbolized by a bird carrying the key to eternity, which leaves the body after death and resides in heaven), all playing their part in the cyclical nature of life and death[citation needed]. The societal obsession with death and life after death meant that the health of the mind or soul played an essential part in one’s overall health. In Ancient Egypt the first known psychiatric text (written around 20th century BC which explains the causes of "hysteria"), the first known mental hospital (a temple complex near modern Saqqara which is thought to be meant for the treatment of the mentally ill), and the first known mental physician are found in history