There are many success stories that involve effective medication therapy.
Can you point to one? I would be curious how they prove that it was the use of medication that lead to success.
How do you decide whether someone needs medication or not? And how do you measure it's effectiveness? You treat physical/chemical conditions with medications and if you want to change these parameters then you have to measure. I've never heard about something like that in case of antidepressants. Not to mention that currently they can't even describe accurately the "chemistry of happyness", then how could they manipulate it effectively? Even if someone "got better" while taking pills for some weird reason it didn't prove that it was the medication (you haven't actually measured anything to prove that). In contrast you can find a lot of people online who are complaining about the terrible side effects. It completely makes no sense to me to treat mental disorders with pills that intend to change physical/chemical parameters without actually measuring them. Not measuring these and trying several different kind of pills is like performing experiments on a rat and all the responsibility is on the "customer"'s shoulders. In case of rat experiments at least they are trying to measure things to be able to learn something from the process in the end.
The difference between a "crappy life" and a "good life" involve a great deal of perspective on an individual level, no medication will reform your thoughts completely. Thats a personal issue.
Then maybe we agree on something. People go to "professionals" with crappy life and sadness, and they get bullshit and medication to treat it that makes no sense. Maybe there are a few cases where medications could give benefits *if* we understood the underlying chemistry more and we actually measured it, *but* we don't understand it so it is just bullshitting around with pills. But even in that case it would be 1 out of a million or billion and I would suspect that much more people are taking pills than that. Why? I simply don't need medications (actually noone needs that crap) and they still wanted to stuff me with it. I went there to be able to talk honestly and to gather some useful info to make my life better because as an isolated introvert with crappy background I didn't have as much experience as others with the same age. For this reason I intentionally selected 2 psychologists who are at least 40 years old and hopefully smarter in the "big life" topic. The result: "oh, you are very sad, stuff yourself with crap..."
I believe that most people don't have physical/chemical disorder. Even if the *root cause* is a chemical disorder we can not really detect and address it, so what do these pills do then (and I'm not interested about neurotransmitter blahblah bullshit that psychologists use to make stupid people more stupid...)? Its probably only a set of lies that make most people sad. If someone lies to herself causing severe mental stress for herself then she will most probably lie to the "professional" too so it makes the usage of a "professional" even more like waste of money.
When it comes to overweigh, the same thing happens: A lot of people try to lie themselves that its the cause of genes. In reality very-very few people have genetic disorder that makes them unable to to lose fat. This is why weigh loss pills/stuff and antidepressants and other things sell well: people like comfortable lies more than reality. Its easier to eat and sitting in front of the TV and hoping that weigh loss pills do the job than actually doing something. Its actually easier to stuff yourself with antidepressants than facing reality. This mental loophole of the human race is an excellent business opportunity.