Should I start on medication?

Hi all

Firstly, I'm kinda glad to have found this forum, hoping to get some help and support as I'm not sure where else to get it.

So, a small bit of background first... I'm just over forty and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety a couple of months back now.

I feel like I'm going to sound very ignorant now but I think, if the diagnosis is right, I have misunderstood what depression is for most of my life... I understood depression to be feelings of sadness, despair and hopelessness that were not brought on necessarily by any actual negative thing happening, but was an illness, be it caused by a chemical imbalance or something else 'medical'.

I have had some horrible things happen the last few years. I am not going into detail, I don't think it's necessary but between loved ones being diagnosed with potentially terminal illnesses, total career failure, loss of all sources of income, death of family members and numerous other things... I've kind of been left feeling totally dead inside. I have always had a fear of death and this past couple of years it has become all-consuming, I can't go more than a couple of hours without thinking about the futility of life and the fact I am going to die and how pointless that makes everything I do.

I haven't bothered going to the doctor about this until recently because I didn't feel this was a 'condition' to be treated, it was just the way anyone would feel under similar circumstances, I guess a suitable analogy would be... if your head suddenly started hurting for no reason you'd go to the doctor to investigate and hopefully give you something to help ease the pain.... if however someone had just punched you in the head, you wouldn't bother... it's obvious and normal why your head is hurting. That's how I felt... I had mentally been punched in the head, repeatedly, for several years, so I didn't need a doctor to help, I needed to stop getting punched.

I still kind of feel like that, like NOT having my life destroyed and having no hope for the future is the thing that needs to be fixed and my mental state will recover accordingly. I suppose I have only now decided to go to the doctor because I have realised that's unlikely to happen and I no longer have any motivation or energy left to try and make it happen, I have resigned myself to the fact my life has pretty much ended with no hope of anything actually improving so I need help mentally coping with that new reality.

Anyway... what I wanted initially was therapy, I wanted to speak to someone, but my GP said I'd have to wait months to get a referral, and I should pay to do it privately... the irony of me being pretty much bankrupt and being told the only way to get help is to pay for it at an insane rate per hour was not lost on me, at least I can still laugh about that :-)

I have been referred and after a few months I have a phone assessment appointment booked for about 4 weeks from now.

In the mean time, my GP was insistent that I should be on medication and has prescribed me Sertraline.

I've read the list of side effects and I must admit I'm scared to death! It sounds like I need to be on them for weeks before I expect to see any positive effects and the negative effects seem to be immediate and in some cases pretty horrible. The withdrawal symptoms when I stop them sound even worse.

I am very tempted to not bother starting.... I guess I really want some advice on whether I have actually been correctly diagnosed and whether starting medication like this is going to be worth it?

I sort of feel like artificially masking the feelings of anger, pain, hopelessness and unhappiness isn't going to help me get my life sorted out... is it really a solution?

Anyway, my thanks in advance for everyone's help and advice....

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