[DanaC]

I tried a few anti-depressants years ago; but didn't like them, and didn;t really treat them with enough respect (note to self: Seroxat is not a recreational drug! )

I am quite wary of anti-depressants on the whole. I think they are often prescribed to people who are not actually suffering from the kinds of depression that the drugs are meant to tackle. That's probably where a lot of the horror stories of people getting worse on meds come from. Some types of depression can be tackled with medication, some really shouldn't. Unfortunately many GPs have a tendency to view it as a simple depressed/not depressed issue and either assume drugs will help, or assume they won't, without actually establishing a real diagnosis of what kind of depression they are looking at or what causal factors might be at play. At the same time, the psychiatric professionals often seem siloed into their own area of expertise and push their own pet strategies almost regardless of depression type/cause.

If you have a bi-polar condition then medication is usually a very sensible route. CBT is great, but is unlikely to be able to tackle wild swings in brain chemistry.

What I do take are drugs that act on anxiety, rather than depression. I take hydroxizine, which is a combination anti-histimine and sedative. Because of the eczema, I get anxious, and because I get anxious the eczema gets worse and so forth. Even if my eczema is ok, if I have a bout of anxiety it will kick it off big style. The hydroxizine allows me to break that cycle when I am in it, and prevent it occurring at certain regular times (such as night time). It's far from perfect, but it helps. Unfortunately medicine hasn't really learned how to deal with the sensation of itching yet. They can block histimine production, but that really only answers a small part of the itch problem: not all itching is the result of histimine production. beyond that, anti-priuritics and sedatives can be helpful: but they all treat itching as essentially a mild form of pain. We now know, though only very recently, that itching is an entirely distinct process using entirely distinct receptors.

All they can really do right now is sedate, mildly anaesthetise and bring down inflammation.

For the rest i self-medicate with pot and coffee, and sci-fi :P