It helps but it's not a magical solution. Like I'm more up, my mood is more stable, all that jazz; but a long life of depression/anxiety/BPD includes habits and thought processes that don't just go away. Therapy helped me in combo with meds, but it's still not exactly like depression disappeared. I was just kind of better off for putting in the work to get better.

As for side effects, I've hardly noticed. A lot of folks worry about the sex drive effect, and for me there was some mild effect, but nothing bad. Didn't change my life in any way or make anything difficult.

Fun random fact, if you're interested in stuff like lsd/shrooms/whatever, antidepressants can kind of mess with that, so worth looking up. You don't want to get serotonin syndrome (it can be serious, my understanding is look out for this especially with shrooms), and it can just kill the whole trip.