Popular myths about antidepressants.

I accidentally saw 5 minutes of the Panorama programme about The Evils of Seroxat, and now I'm pacing round the flat with teeth clenched and swearing a lot. I had to stop watching the programme because I was so goddamned angry. This wasn't even the original Evils of Seroxat programme - it was the followup!

I would just like to repeat what I've said before: that taking antidepressants is like hitting your head with a sledgehammer.

Myth number 1: Antidepressants are a magic cure-all. Er, nope. If your life is a mess, it's not going to suddenly improve because you're on an antidepressant. The best that can happen is that with a combination of the right drug, support from friends and/or family, and support and therapy from mental health professionals, you can get to a point where you're strong enough to rebuild your life into less of a mess. It might take a long time to get you to the point of being strong enough, even if you get the right drug first time, and it might take several attempts of rebuilding before things look any better. (This of course can lead to a dangerous situation whereby your first attempt to sort things out has failed horribly and you end up more depressed than before.)

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Of pizza flyers and Indian.

We are plagued by pizza flyers. Pretty much every day, including Sunday, we open our letterbox to find flyers for one pizza delivery place or another - we get at least 5 a week. It's really quite annoying, because if we fancy a greasy American-style pizza, there's Tops Pizza just round the corner, who do nice pizzas with special offers on collection. For some reason, we get flyers through our door advertising pizza places not only in the town we live, but in the suburbs on either side, the towns beyond them and sometimes even further - one company in particular seems to think we might want to buy pizza from them even though they're a good 20 minutes away on one of those little mopeds. Pizza that will be fresh and hot when it gets here, or pizza that's gone soggy through sitting in a bag for 20 minutes - what a decision! However, there's something of a shortage of food places that will deliver something other than pizza here.

Thus, when a new Indian delivery service put its flyers through the doors here two weeks ago, they were inundated with custom. They deliver in 35 minutes, take cards over the phone and their food is really good. Sounds like they've found a niche in the market. I'm not very in tune with my Asian ancestry, but something makes sense when I look at an Indian menu. Naan bread, chapatis, puris, parathas and poppadoms - to say nothing of rice or dosas. What other cuisine embraces four or five types of carbohydrate in one meal?

I'm frazzled from baking (making cake is fun, but it's hard to bake a cake without baking yourself in the process) and can't be bothered to cook dinner as well, so we put an order in. In less than the time it took me to write this LJ entry, a delicious meal has arrived. So I'm going to go and eat it.