Erin, you are a great step-mom! Your priorities are clearly right: the needs of the child come first.
Here's a weird thing. I've taken no medications today. No antidepressants, no antianxiety meds, no painkillers, no decongestants, no antihistamines. I didn't plan it; I just forgot everything until about two hours ago. Now, I'm not taking this as proof that I don't need any of them, but it's heartening to know that if I skip a day, I don't fall apart.
I'm tapering off my antidepressant. I've done this before, unsuccessfully, but I haven't been in such a good emotional place before, in many many years. Also, the high dose of Wellbutrin I was taking was causing tremors in my hands, and I didn't want to risk that becoming permanent. So I went from 450 mg/day to 300, and now I've gone to 150. My shrink is keeping an eye on me, and thinks that the Deplin may be making a real difference in how much I need. He says that if I'm one of those people who doesn't metabolize folate/folic acid very well, the Deplin might prove to be all I really need. (Deplin is methylfolate, a version of that B vitamin that's already in the form the body needs it to be in.) If my problem turns out to have been a lack of vitamin B-whatever all this time, that would explain why no antidepressant has ever really worked for me. We'll see, I guess. More adventures in chemical enhancement.
Personally, I think Prozac and birth control pills screwed me up completely and permanently in my early twenties, and after twenty years of one unsuccessful drug after another, all I can do now is try to control the damage. Prozac etc surely have saved many people's lives and made many people's lives better, but I don't think I'm one of them.