> Now you have to cancel the trip or go without the medicine.
International travel is a minuscule thing to give up if you get effective depression (or pretty much any chronic condition) treatment in exchange. Heck most people can't justify the expense of international travel in the first place and the number of people who do it regularly for work and have depression is very small compared to the number of people who have depression. Practically nobody is going to let a chronic condition that affects their daily life go untreated because there's a short list of countries they can't have that treatment in.
What exactly are you arguing? That people should be happy with the flaws of the status quo, and that we should not follow up on promising new treatments that don't have those flaws, because...?
I thought my point was fairly clear and I'm not sure how you managed to derive the "people should be happy with the status quo and not follow up on promising new treatments with less flaws" from what I said. I'm arguing that "prevents international travel in some cases" is an inconsequential side effect for anything that treats an often debilitating chronic illness that is not even within the realm of consideration for the overwhelming majority of patients and that likewise "no negative effects on international travel" is not really a meaningful improvement over the status quo of treatments (all else being equal). Basically, if your biggest gripe with a treatment for a chronic illness is that you can't travel internationally then that's a pretty small gripe.
It was one example to illustrate one of the potential problems.
A much bigger issue is as pointed out by harimau777: prescriptions often don't get filled on time and sometimes not at all. Plenty of people run out of pills on holidays and have to suffer withdrawals, with suicidal ideation and actions being one of the symptoms of acute withdrawal from benzos.
Daily medication that requires a prescription is a huge problem for people that actually have to take it. What if they can't afford it at some point? What if their physician changes and the new physician doesn't want to prescribe it?
Why are we even defending daily medication? If there is any possibility of a permanent cure, obviously that is a much better choice of treatment.
His biggest gripe is that the pill has to be taken every day or very frequently. There are loads of circumstances which make that less desireable than taking a pill a few times a year instead. You've latched onto the travel example he gave.
International travel is a minuscule thing to give up if you get effective depression (or pretty much any chronic condition) treatment in exchange. Heck most people can't justify the expense of international travel in the first place and the number of people who do it regularly for work and have depression is very small compared to the number of people who have depression. Practically nobody is going to let a chronic condition that affects their daily life go untreated because there's a short list of countries they can't have that treatment in.