How do you know she hadn't already tried medication, but they just didn't work? Justine comes from an affluent background, so she could afford hood health care. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean she hadn't tried getting help before the wedding or before Melancholia's appearance.
shareMedicine doesn't always work. Look what happened to David Foster Wallace.
shareMedicine is always worth trying but as someone who has been the rounds with the pharmaceuticals, finding the right one is a process sometimes. A good portion of depression meds make the user feel worse for the first 2 weeks and even then they generally take 6-8 weeks to reach a therapeutic level in your blood stream. In the interim, you often have unpleasant side effects like loss of appetite, nausea, excessive lethargy with an inability to sleep, headaches...The reason medication doesn't help a lot of people is because they give it up before the drug can build up in their blood because the side effects are simply too much to handle.
Any doctor or psychiatrist will tell you that you can't really judge whether a medication worked for you or not unless you've been on it for 8 weeks.
A lot of them also cause significant weight gain which can lead some to quit or become depressed all over again. I gained 55 pounds on one medication.
There's also the very real withdrawal phase one eventually must go through should they decide to get off the med. Some of the withdrawals are so horrific, they have online support sites for those weaning off a specific medication. It can be physically and psychologically grueling to quit some of this stuff and going cold turkey can actually kill you. It's scary.
So in the end, it's not as simple as "There's medication to help you." It's a very vast and complicated issue.
Yes this is the sad part about medication. I think that mental health professionals really want to help their patients, but often I feel like we are still in the "let's bleed that person or put leeches on the wound" phase of mental illness. Hopefully science can come up with more effective treatments in the future.
I cried when I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet. And then I laughed...really hard.
She seems more bipolar than depressed, what I'm wondering is how she managed to hold on to her job that long if she is that way. Although maybe her premonitions about the impending doom caused her to act more erratic.
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