Zoloft as ad-hominem attack
If the last acceptable form of bigotry is anti-Catholicism, the second-last is anti-anti-depressants. I’ve observed faithful pastors tossing off one-liners about mega-church pastors being on Zoloft, and it needs to be said: Guys, it’s not funny.
Depression is a serious illness that affects both the mind and the body, and those who are afflicted with it often need medication. Sometimes it’s for a few months, but it may be for the rest of their lives. There is a serious stigma attached to the medications, though, that often worsens the problem and prevents people from seeking help. Is medication sometimes misused or unnecessary? Probably. But that doesn’t detract from the very real problems that people have, and the necessity of medication in some cases for people to get to the point that they can address the spiritual and psycho-social causes of their depression.
So pastors, please beware of mocking anti-depressant medications and those on them. You probably have people in your parish who are taking them, and people who should be. They need your help – private confession, spiritual counsel, friendly support – and they’re not going to think about talking to you if you appear to be the enemy.
Check out “I Trust When Dark My Road” for a confessional Lutheran pastor’s chronicle of his battle with depression. The fact that he felt he needed to write it anonymously says something very disturbing about the church today.
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Let me add a hearty amen:
AMEN!
Good post. Thank you.
A while back I saw this on a Lutheran church’s street-side sign: “Too blessed to be depressed.” I was not inspired by the message, to say the least. Thankfully, it was not my own church. I wouldn’t want to go to a church that displays such cluelessness and lack of compassion.
BTW, I didn’t put the little “smiley” in the above comment. It was automatically inserted because I keyed a quotation mark followed by a closed parenthesis – lest anyone think I’m cracking a joke.
The fact that this is a conversation that has been going on for pushing a month is an indication of how serious and widespread of an issue this really is. Doctors are motivated by greed, just like the rest of us. The abuse does not negate the use. In my experience, it is still a much more widespread problem to underdiagnose depression than overdiagnose. This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to the pastoral office. I think that there is a huge number of clergy that suffer from clinical depression.
I got a hit today on my blog by someone who googled “zoloft jokes”. ‘Nuff said.
Pastor Beane, I'm on SSRI's (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, a family of drugs including Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Paxil, Lexapro, Zoloft and others)) for a chronic condition other than depression, though I've also taken them for that.. In the past, I've specifically taken Zoloft.
Your post reflects a common misconception about SSRI's that needs to be corrected. They cannot be taken as "happy pills." All they do is to prevent the re-absorption of a neurotransmitter called seratonin, which tends to be in short supply in depression and certain other conditions. If a person not suffering from such a condition took them, nothing would happen. Zilch.
All SSRI's do is to restore a normal brain chemistry. Where the brain chemistry is normal already, they have no effect. In fact, an excess of seratonin, far from producing happiness, causes an extremely dangerous and potentially lethal condition called (for some reason) the Seratonin Syndrome.
I think you'd be surprised at the number of people who suffer from either clinical depression or one of the other under diagnosed conditions, both psychological and sometimes somatic, treated with SSRI's. But in any event, it would be a really good thing to put the "happy pill" business to bed. SSRI's can be abused only by taking them in dangerous amounts. They do not produce a "high;" they merely restore normal levels of a neurotransmitter in people suffering from abnormally low levels of it. Or they put them at risk of a very unpleasant and dangerous condition.
SSRIs are about as far from "happy pills" as I think I know.
This is an important topic, and I don't want to squelch continued discussion. However, future readers should know that Pr's Beane, Fast, and myself had a very fruitful private correspondence on this matter following the comments here, which resolved the friendly disagreements on this topic. The topic of depression, medication, and the Christian will likely be a topic of this blog again in the future, and additional thoughts are certainly welcome in this comment thread.