Most people are locked onto their antidepressants because the concept of a chemical imbalance absolves them of guilt and responsibility. So initially it goes like this:

"I'm depressed. I'm a mess. It's awful. What's wrong with me? There is something inherently wrong with me to make me this way and I'm just a horrible no good person no matter what. I hate myself."

Then that person is told they have a chemical imbalance. That's their "inherent flaw." But it's not their "fault" and "there's nothing they can do about it" but take meds. The above depressed monologue before the introduction of meds actually carries over into why people are told they need to take meds, and thus it perpetuates itself. In other words, the "something inherently wrong with me" stays, but the "it's all my fault" changes. This is what glues people to meds. They psychologically simply cannot unglue themselves because the meds themselves are simultaneously absolving a person of "guilt" or "wrongdoing" through the argument that they have a brain illness while also perpetuating the initial depressive idea that they have an inherent flaw or disease which is unchangeable and can never be changed without medication.

There's nothing that can't be changed. The brain is malleable and alive. It can be reshaped by working through your own shit. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a difficult life, or difficult parts of their lives, and that actually gives you so much potential. Because the more you have to work through, the more you can change for the better. Not because there is something wrong with you. There's no inherent flaw. But because it would make your life better. It would make you happier. The idea of responsibility for oneself doesn't have to have a blaming or accusatory tone. It's the ultimate form of freedom and power.

Antidepressants really are the easy way out and what's more, they are dangerous at worst and useless at best. You may as well self medicate with alcohol or heroin. You'd feel a lot better on those things too, so it would be worth it in that case, right?

We all know pain. We all know suffering and we know how soul crushingly horrific and unbearable it is. God does it hurt. The first desperate instinct is to fix it in the quickest and easiest way possible. That's what antidepressants are offered as. A cure-all. There is no cure-all for anything. It's a long, slow, hard process, with or without antidepressants, and there's no sugar coating how much it hurts. No one knows if they'll come out on the other side in anything. Yet here we all still are.

The dominant social narrative defends meds. Makes them seem healthy, safe, necessary. It manipulates the term "stigma" to the extent that it's now an Orwellian term which has lost all meaning and context. It's "stigma" for people to question the narrative. It's stigma for people to point out the lack of evidence in support of both antidepressants and the chemical imbalance theory. Because even though it's true, it's "discriminating against mentally ill people." And a lot of people with mental illness lap this up to their own detriment, because of the cognitive maze they're trying to navigate which I specified above. Because they need absolution and "if I have to suffer, at least let it not be my fault."