Pain and opioid addiction are not the only things kratom is good for. There are tons of people out there who use it for depression and anxiety, and the state of mental health services in the US is just as shitty as that of chronic pain management.

Nobody has developed any new pharmaceuticals for depression or anxiety disorders in decades, despite SSRIs having horrible side effects (significant weight gain, cognitive and emotional blunting, inability to perform sexually, etc) and barely outperforming placebos in trials. People who take them for years and then try to stop face withdrawal that has been compared to benzos or opioids, yet doctors don’t take it seriously. They’re next to worthless for the countless people that don’t respond to them, and doctors still don’t seem to know how to do anything but push more SSRIs on people that obviously need something different.

The other major issue is we treat situational depression the same way we treat biochemical depression. Imagine being depressed because the circumstances of your life suck in ways that are out of your control. You have three part time jobs that you hate, live one car breakdown or illness away from not being able to make rent, and are responsible for taking care of an aging family member with cancer.

That’s the reality for many people, yet it’s still taboo to open up about how bad it is. People will throw around the phrase “get help” without even understanding what that entails. Admit even in passing that the thought of ending your life has crossed your mind (and to be real, it has probably crossed most people’s minds on occasion when things are hard) and the “solution” is to lock you in a prison-like psych ward and pump you full of pharmaceuticals. This could make things even worse for people who are depressed because they’re living close to the edge of a financial disaster. Kratom really does take the edge off life for many under extreme stress and is much better when used responsibly than many of the alternative scenarios.

I know this has gone off on a tangent, but this has been on my mind over the last several months because I’m studying in a health science field and have spent a lot of time volunteering in hospitals and seen how fucked up and worthless our mental health services are for most people. I’ve seen “treatments” ruin lives even worse than they were to begin with. People with depression and anxiety desperately need things like kratom, and we need to talk about this important aspect of it in conversations around it’s legality.