I am very concerned with the addictive properties of many antidepressant drugs that are in common use. By addicting properties I am referring to the rebound agitation that occurs when I attempt to withdraw these medications like anxiety, headaches, restlessness and severe sleep disturbance. These are the same effects we see withdrawing the street drugs and I believe Henry is quite correct in attributing these rebound effects to the brains compensatory mechanisms. This compensation is being used to sustain the style of life by alternate pathways. I feel that most of the "beneficial" effects of these drugs are actually the lack of affect that they induce, but thinking teleologically, the style of life, present since age 3 to 5, will come out the side door and the patient will have no improvement in his feeling of social "belongingness", but rather further escapes the tasks common to humans of belonging and giving. A "chemical robot" is not a cure of the dysfunction, it just makes the person less evidently troubled by their clear and obvious flight from the demands of life.

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George Neeson M.D.