The funny thing is, I thought it was less depression than insomnia that was driving me crazy. For close to a decade, I'd had major sleeping problems; I'd tried everything I could think of to cure myself (cutting out alcohol, cutting out caffeine, practicing better "sleep hygiene," melatonin, etc.); nothing had worked.

I'd given up on finding a cure, by then, and I just felt too tired to keep living. Most days were a trial of exhaustion. My head often seemed to prickle with a pins-and-needly feeling that was half numbness, half pain. Having to force myself through another year of despair, only to surely face one more just like it after I climbed the mountain of days--and then another year of bad sleep, and another after that--held no appeal, to put it mildly.

I'd never thought I was truly depressed before that point. Mopey, maybe; a little screwed-up, sure; in therapy to try to figure out why I had so much trouble with relationships, certainly. But, as it turns out, vividly envisioning your own suicide in the spot where you'd actually go through with it is a quite compelling way to start believing that, yes, you're definitely depressed.

After getting down from the bridge, I went to see my primary care doctor, and told her, in tears, about what happened. She got me started on Celexa--an SSRI, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that magically solved my sleeping problems. (As she told me during that visit, insomnia can be both a symptom and cause of depression; if I'd heard that before, it had not really registered.) The more rested I felt, the more energy I began to have. Celexa restored me to life, giving me a certain basic sense of well-being that was as physical as it was psychological.

Do I wish I'd started taking antidepressants long before such a terrible idea implanted itself so deeply in mind? I do. Do I wish my psychologist--who was more aware of my sleeping problems than my doc--had urged me to take them? Absolutely. Do I regret taking them? Not a bit. I was on medication for two years (though I eventually switched to Wellbutrin, because Celexa was making me gain weight); when I felt strong again, I went off them--after consulting my doctor--and found, miraculously, I was able to sleep pretty well without them. (About a year after that--when the break-up of a relationship and a few big setbacks hit me all at once--I stopped being able to sleep again, and I returned to Wellbutrin.)

As a result of my experience, my impulse is to proselytize about the benefits of antidepressants. But maybe what antidepressants need, these days, is a defender more than a proponent.

***

The most high-profile hit job on psychiatric medications--and antidepressants in particular--came last summer, courtesy of Marcia Angell, a writer for the New York Review of Books. In a much-ballyhooed two-part article, Angell drew on three new books as she cautioned that we don't know much about the long-term effects of antidepressants; that, in fact, we don't even know precisely why or how they work. She pointed to some evidence that would suggest they're not much more effective than placebos. She questioned the relationship between the psychiatric community and the pharmaceutical industry. She speculated that psychoactive drugs, which seem to be overprescribed, might "create worse problems than they solve." In conclusion, she called the three books she focused on -- The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry--A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat -- "powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the 'frenzy' of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest."