Zoloft and Depression

Yeah. So I remember distinctly during the pandemic. I was 31 years old, and my mental health at that time, it was really at an all time low. My life was just unraveling. This is Blake. He lives in Long Beach, California. And a few years ago, he began to struggle with depression. I was broke. My car broke down. I remember running out of gas one day, and I was stuck on the side of the road. And I didn't even have enough money in my checking account to cover it because I had so much debt from, like, getting taken advantage of in crypto and all of that. It was just one thing piling on top of another, and I was just having panic attacks like crazy. I wasn't sleeping for days on end. My girlfriend was terrified. I wasn't in a good place. I was suicidal. I did not want to be in this world. I finally just got to the point where I had nothing to lose, and I just reached out to a doctor who referred me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had me fill out paperwork where I would list my mood per question. So it would be something like, how do you feel about going to work every day? Very satisfied or very dissatisfied? There's a scale. So just various questions like that. And I was noticing as I was filling this out, every question I was asked, I was checking off very dissatisfied for pretty much all of them. And it kinda hit me like a bolt of lightning because I had all these years of untreated trauma and chronic stress. I guess I was essentially trying to drive a car with an empty gas tank. It really just didn't matter how hard I pushed. I just wasn't going anywhere. And, he recommended Zoloft. I'm Thomas Goetz, and this is drug story. Today's drug story is about Zoloft, an antidepressant that's also known as sertraline. Sertraline is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in The United States. About eight million Americans take it to manage their depression. If they're lucky, most of those eight million people have an experience like Blake did. They take a survey, measure the problem, get a prescription. And, once I I started seeing those changes, it was like someone had turned on the lights in a dim room or something. I went from being weighed down by a constant state of fog and anxiety to waking up with more hope and excitement. Tasks that felt very difficult just became a lot more manageable, and they were even enjoyable. I had more confidence. I started having dreams again, like, ambitions and these beliefs that I could actually achieve what I put my mind to instead of just always being pessimistic and thinking of nah, like, I'm not good enough to do this. I'm not good enough to do that. And just all these negative thoughts that would just consume …