Antidepressants and The Happiness Trap: Looking Beyond a Medication-Only Approach

Many people begin antidepressants with a quiet hope: that life will finally feel lighter, steadier, maybe even happy. When that doesn’t quite happen—or when the change feels incomplete—it’s easy to turn that disappointment inward. Why isn’t this working for me?
But this reaction says less about the person, and more about the expectations we place on both happiness and medication.

In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris gently challenges the idea that wellbeing means feeling good all the time. He describes how modern culture treats sadness, anxiety, grief, and self-doubt as problems to eliminate, rather than natural parts of being human. Within this mindset, medication can quietly become the sole solution—something meant to erase pain rather than support a person through it.

Antidepressants can be deeply valuable. For many people, they reduce the intensity of symptoms, lift the fog just enough to function, or create some much-needed breathing space. They can be stabilising, protective, even life-saving. But medication doesn’t teach us how to respond to loss, trauma, loneliness, or ongoing stress. It doesn’t help us clarify what matters, rebuild trust in ourselves, or find meaning after things fall apart.

When treatment focuses only on medication, people can feel stuck in a subtle bind. They may feel less unwell but not more alive or connected. Others worry about stopping medication because no other supports or skills were developed alongside it. In some cases, very human emotional responses—grief after loss, despair in burnout, anger in the face of injustice—are treated as symptoms to suppress rather than signals to listen to.

A more compassionate approach asks gentler, deeper questions:

• What has this person lived through?

• What is their distress trying to protect or express?

• What kind of life do they want to move toward, even with discomfort present?

Psychological therapies, meaningful relationships, social and structural supports, trauma-informed care, and practical changes to daily life all speak to parts of suffering that medication alone cannot reach. Approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy don’t promise constant happiness. Instead, they offer something quieter and more sustainable: the ability to make room for difficult feelings while still moving toward what matters.

Antidepressants are not the enemy—but they are rarely the whole story. When we step out of the happiness trap, the goal gently shifts. It’s no longer about feeling good all the time, or erasing every trace of sadness or anxiety. Instead, it becomes about learning how to live a meaningful, connected life, even when things are messy, painful, or uncertain.

In that light, recovery isn’t measured by constant happiness, but by growing capacity: to feel, to choose, to care, and to move toward what matters. And that is a far kinder, more human way to think about healing.