Psych meds are not as effective as people fear
People have no idea how far away we are from "happy pills”
You see all these headlines like "Should we medicate away bad feelings?" and "Does life mean anything if you can just control how you feel all the time?" and I just want to laugh.
People have no idea how far away we are from "happy pills." I think they imagine that taking your psychiatric meds is like a type 1 diabetic taking insulin— replacing the thing that's missing. Psych meds are very coarse and gross in their effects. We don't exactly know how most of them work. All we can really do is douse the brain with a chemical. SSRI anti-depressants affect the whole serotonin system which has projections into the entire central nervous system. They were developed and implemented under one theory of how they would affect depression (the theory that depression was due to lack of available serotonin), but now the consensus is that that's not how they work. They have a lot of side effects and don't work for a lot of people. This is hardly putting our finger on the switch of happiness and flipping it.
More gallingly, there's this idea that if mentally ill people would just "take their meds" like responsible adults, everything would be fine. As if mental illness is like an inborn error of metabolism, i.e. you can't make your own arginine and so you have to take a supplement. The challenge with mental illness isn't providing a missing chemical-- it's trying to make directed and sustained changes in a bafflingly complex dynamic system that we don't understand. If mental illness is due to a "chemical imbalance" (I think that's an oversimplified and outdated view from the era of "what you need is more serotonin"), we don't know what the imbalance is. And there's definitely not a pill for it.
The struggle with mental illness is not whether or not to take meds so effective they present a philosophical dilemma. The struggle with managing mental illness is to find meds that have the desired effects to a great enough degree enough of the time to outweigh their side effects. Here’s hoping that one day our biggest problem is deciding whether we want to be happy all the time, but we aren’t there yet.