Are you on any psychiatric drugs?

You're welcome. I'm sorry to hear about your having gone through clinical depression and your occasional bouts of depression. Depression is so painful. I am glad you are able to cope and are generally happy :). I'm glad I could help in terms of giving you my experience to others. I do have a master's in Counseling Psychology and I am a Counselor in a school, but obviously I can't prescribe medications nor am I any expert on them nor was I trained in medications at all. However, I'm glad my experience on meds and my understanding of how they're supposed to work correctly (not that they always do and not that my understanding is necessarily correct even), could be of use to others and I hope others will post too. Having lots of information is helpful in making a decision. I know that the person who convinced me to try meds (I was very against trying them at one time), said to me if you had diabetes would you not take your insulin. I know it's kind of an apples to orange comparison in some ways, but in other ways, I think that person was trying to say to me "yeah if you're sick and you're not getting better and there's something else you can try, maybe consider trying." I do hope to go off one day, but I'm scared for the reasons I already stated. I'm glad I started this survey, because I think it led to some helpful discussion. I completely agree with you that kids are sometimes over-medicated and plans to wean off sometimes are not there. It's should be a last resort to put kids on meds because they need their liver for a long time. However, there are kids who have psychosis who need it young in my opinion and there are other kids who do need it as a last resort for other reasons. In my opinion, at times they can be weened off and a plan should be made and at times they can't because they are too sick without them. The same with adults in my opinion. It's a really complicated issue.