Since mental health is such a crucial part of wellbeing and can affect almost every aspect of a person's life, it is an issue that has greater philosophical significance than is usually admitted. The way various mental illnesses shape lives, the aspects of introspective and sensory perception related to them, and the existential issues associated with them merit a great deal of thought and acknowledgment. Resolving as many mental illnesses or disorders as possible is a goal that could quite literally transform an untold number of lives. Aside from the fact that some mental illnesses like depression or anxiety can actually make it harder to come forward with them and seek medication or non-medication treatment, general myths about mental illness and negative assumptions or exaggerations about the side effects of various treatments can dissuade someone from seeking assistance.
Fear of side effects spurred by uncontemplated hearsay is often what many who object to medications for mental illnesses seem to be driven by. Indeed, medications for mental illnesses can lead to physical side effects like extensive hair loss or weight gain or even something that is extremely ironic: greater intensities of the mental illness a medication is supposed to quell or other mental illnesses. The issue is that even reported or directly experienced side effects do not necessarily occur for every individual who attempts a given medication treatment, as well as something that poses a greater epistemological problem for ridding people of mental health disorders.
Now, it is impossible for even an utterly effective medication or non-medication treatment to be proven to hold its effectiveness in the future or for it to be proven to help all people just because one or some benefitted from it. Moreover, when almost everything about perceptions of the external world, including the medications in it, could be an illusion, it is not even as if a medication one is looking at or holding can be proven to exist! However, these truths apply to sensory experiences that have nothing to do with treatments for physical or mental health. The epistemological issue specifically pertaining to medications for mental health problems is the fact that one must use a medication before its side effects can be identified to the fullest extent that limited sensory-sensory or sensory-psychological correlations allow for.
In a broader sense, this means that multiple people must try a medication for there to even be any evidence-based (but not logically airtight) way of discovering its uses and side effects. There will not be any progress made with pinpointing correlations between side effects and any medication or treatment for mental illnesses until at least some people actually take them. When it comes to scientific matters or even physical events that correspond to psychological states or changes, there is no way to logically prove which possibilities will come to pass ahead of time (for anything that is logically possible could happen), and yet to completely avoid all use of treatments with human subjects will only mean more potential cures or aids go unrecognized. Of course, this would mean that mental illnesses would go untreated or more inefficiently treated.
It takes a true rationalist to not make any assumptions at all about mental health (or any other issue), but mental health problems could be experienced by anyone. As they avoid all assumptions and reason out logical truths about the concepts and experiences of mental illnesses, rationalists also need to directly encourage openness and honesty about how they live in light of these truths and experiences. Another indispensable part of actually taking mental health seriously in a social or medical context is giving medications a chance to be tested at least with those who are willing to seek relief even from new, experimental, or unlikely sources. No one needs to volunteer or request to try something that is supposedly harmful or untested. It is still true that if individuals and societies want to genuinely increase the probability of some mental illnesses being eradicated or others brought under control, taking medications or trying other treatments is something that must be done by someone.
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