lol "someone depressed but on SSRIs doesn't have active mental illness" is incredible cope. Turning yourself into a zombified form that doesn't feel your emotions is a different kind of mental illness, still active.
Who I am doesn't change if I take a substance, but how I "feel" about who I am can change. Still incredibly addict-coded saying HRT makes you feel better, feel right. Just like heroin.
There's a point to be made that in at least some patients, psych meds work not by correcting a brain-wide chemical imbalance, but by simply changing the behavior of local chemical processes (or electrochemical in the case of topiramate) in a way that might provide some sort of actual or perceived benefit to the patient and/or the patient's environment. A medication that makes crying metabolically more "expensive" will make it harder to cry. This doesn't correct for an imbalance as much as it, broadly, changes the way your brain processes thoughts and experiences emotions. And in my honest opinion, the use of antipsychotics is often a form of control, one that suppresses the motivation behind rewards and avoidance while also leaving basic reflexes and other abilities (like language and maybe pleasure, distinct from motivation or satisfaction) intact. It's a great way to demotivate people from "bad behavior," or effectively slow the dopaminergic pathways to the point where maybe, someone might have to take a little longer and think more about their actions, or might not even feel much reward from them.
They can make music less enjoyable. Even if someone still listens to it, and says they like it, they're less likely to get chills from it or even seek it out in some studies. I remember reading an anecdotal report of an ex-metalhead who suddenly started mixing up multiple songs they knew by heart and had no enjoyment of a concert they looked forward to.
They can also cause the negative symptoms of some of the conditions they treat, make certain conditions (such as adhd) worse, etc.
An antipsychotic can make it less motivating to ruminate on autotheism. It can also make it less motivating to code or make art, and a lot of bipolar people say they can only be creative if they plan things out. Also, they develop pickier tastes.
An antipsychotic can suppress the conditioned avoidance response that allows you to intuitively associate antecedents (such as a car horn) with consequences (such as a potential crash if you don't get out of the way). This can perhaps be useful to break up certain patterns built up by trauma or to make someone lose certain associations. But it can also force someone to rely more on both immediate reflexes (only reacting when the car is about to hit you) and intellectual learning (taking time to process the car horn) when doing stuff like driving, and potentially impairing your reaction time. But this might be useful if you really want your autistic kid to find it harder to escape family dinners over the smell.
An antipsychotic can also blunt hallucinations by blunting imagination and abstract thought in general.
Really, it's like the use of the even stronger Benperidol to treat fetishes, not by specifically turning a vore freak into a model vanilla citizen, but by suppressing a healthy sex drive altogether to mute the reward of the attraction that triggers it. Similar techniques have been tried on gay men.
And like SSRIs, HRT and even castration does not necessarily rob someone of their sex drive.
But it can.
And HRT can act on the brain in many ways... but many are placebo, circumstantial, or if real, not universal.
If HRT really changed a person's interests (hobby-wise, sexual, aesthetic, or otherwise), you'd expect any woman who likes to wear T-shirts in public past 30 and solder electronics alone to have some kind of hormonal abnormality, and also expect her behavior to "feminize" if said imbalance is "corrected."
I think pop psych is just a more advanced version of humorism, just like Myers-Briggs is horoscopes, but with a personality test instead of sun signs.
