I think that instead of fluoride, we should be putting anti-depressants in the water. I started taking them about half-way through my radiation treatments.
What we know about flouride,
sodium fluoride (to be precise), is it’s a simple molecule and its benefit to tooth and bone development during childhood is indisputable. I’m also saying this as someone who was raised where fluoridation was already in place before I was born and, to this day, I haven’t been dinged with a cavity (which is only impressive once one considers how there was a 19-year stretch when I didn’t have access to a dentist, and once I did, they were impressed with my teeth and in the shape they were).
The thing about anti-depressants is not only are they complex molecules, but they all work slightly differently — even anti-depressants within the same class, such as SSRIs or SNRIs — and their impact on human neurology can be as specific as an individual neurological response to those molecules.
Put another way: some people’s neurology responds well to an SSRI — and possibly one
specific SSRI — whilst for others, a selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor isn’t doing to put a dent in their depression, because the particular neurochemical component(s) needing adjustment might be to their norepinephrine, dopamine, monoamine oxidase, and so on. And for people without depression, consuming anti-depressants, such as would be the case in water supply, may have pretty adverse, negative impacts on their neurochemistry.
Speaking on my own neurochemistry, I know definitively that SSRIs (like escitalopram or fluoxetine) not only
don’t work for me, but they also have a negative impact. Escitalopram, for example, robbed me of what little energy I had. I spent years on an oddball anti-depressant buproprion, which worked pretty well for over a decade — until it didn’t. And what I’m on now is actually
two anti-depressants of different classes, working in synergy with one another.
I’d already been through months of chemo and a double mastectomy, and radiation was nothing. But one day I arrived for my appointment and it was pouring. By the time I got my walker off the carrier on the back of the car and into the building I was frustrated, angry, and crying harder than the rain. When I got in to see the radiation oncologist he said “If you want I can give you something,” and I said yes. That was 8 years ago. I’m a much better person now because of it.
Anti-depressants, especially when they’re the right one for a particular neurology, are a life-saver.
I wouldn’t be alive without them. And anti-depressant security is constantly on my mind, because when that security gets jeopardized, so does my ability to function and, likewise, live. The last time I ran out and was unable to afford a refill, the floor beneath me fell out and I landed back into the hole of non-function, non-communication, non-energy, and
[self-harm warning] planning how to die in a way which would be the least traumatic for the person(s) to find my body.
With depression, there is no sadness. There is only a severe anhedonia.
Those medications and that “treatment” were professionally acceptable praxis in 1986, just as the trans-orbital lobotomy was prior to that.