They do work, but they aren't miracles and they certainly won't all work for you, it'll be a process to find what works unless you get lucky. I cycled through so many of them.
- I found SSRIs the least effective, I went through several and experienced everything from nothing to throwing up blood. Sertraline was the best of them for me, it felt like it took the edge off the depression. It certainly didn't fix it, but it made it slightly more tolerable.
- Then I was on mirtazapine, that's a NASSA (Noradrenaline and specific serotonergic antidepressant) and it was good for anxiety and I stayed on that one for a while.
- They put me on an SNRI (Serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors) called venlafaxine which made me manic as fuck (I'm bipolar). I dunno how that'd work for normal people but it definitely improved my mood lol. I was literally dancing in the street, but unfortunately I also went to work and deleted my code and rewrote it using a hypothesis about prime numbers I developed whilst being unable to sleep.
Anyways, I'm currently on vortioxetine which is a SMS (serotonin modulator and stimulator) and I'd say it helps. When they also added an antipyschotic I genuinely did feel more stable for a long while, it took away the lows but unfortunately also the highs. But then the world made my life infinitely more shit and now I barely even bother taking them. If your life has any hope whatsoever of getting better, I'd say antidepressants are a tool that'll help you get there rather than the fix themselves, if you can find one that works for you.