If you haven't tried cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) make sure to check it out given your unfounded as far as I can tell terror of anti-depressants. Cognitive therapy (long before the "behavioral" bit was added) was very useful for me, and in 20/20 hindsight made further talking therapy useless.
I'm not a standard case, have a inherited combined anxiety and depression problem that behaves somewhat like bipolar disorder without ever going manic (see below for exception), it's "refractory" but I've found the two last out of three generations of anti-depressants to be very helpful, although far from cures.
I have no idea whatsoever what convinced you "SSRIs and other anti-depressants" "have really bad side-effects for most people that take them." That was certainly true for the first generation MAO inhibitors and I knew someone on one who had the usual food problem, but is much less true for the second generation of tricylics, and not at all true for the third which started with the SSRI PROZAC/fluoxetine.
If after all you've gone through you're still literally willing to live a miserable life without at least trying a third generation anti-depressant I don't see what we can say that will convince you. You certainly might have a bad reaction to one or more members of this class of drugs as I and a friend have had (PAXIL/paroxetine made me hypomanic, a friend had suicidal ideation which she simply recognized and fixed by stopping taking the drug), and perhaps as others note you may have to try several to see if one works.
Note one of the biggest mistakes made in prescribing them is not moving to a high enough dose quickly enough if a smaller one is tolerated but doesn't have much of an effect. Everything else you need to know about them is well documented, although you'll have to find better sources than whatever has convinced you these drugs are simply too dangerous to even try.
I'm not a standard case, have a inherited combined anxiety and depression problem that behaves somewhat like bipolar disorder without ever going manic (see below for exception), it's "refractory" but I've found the two last out of three generations of anti-depressants to be very helpful, although far from cures.
I have no idea whatsoever what convinced you "SSRIs and other anti-depressants" "have really bad side-effects for most people that take them." That was certainly true for the first generation MAO inhibitors and I knew someone on one who had the usual food problem, but is much less true for the second generation of tricylics, and not at all true for the third which started with the SSRI PROZAC/fluoxetine.
If after all you've gone through you're still literally willing to live a miserable life without at least trying a third generation anti-depressant I don't see what we can say that will convince you. You certainly might have a bad reaction to one or more members of this class of drugs as I and a friend have had (PAXIL/paroxetine made me hypomanic, a friend had suicidal ideation which she simply recognized and fixed by stopping taking the drug), and perhaps as others note you may have to try several to see if one works.
Note one of the biggest mistakes made in prescribing them is not moving to a high enough dose quickly enough if a smaller one is tolerated but doesn't have much of an effect. Everything else you need to know about them is well documented, although you'll have to find better sources than whatever has convinced you these drugs are simply too dangerous to even try.