Yes different people have different pain tolerances, you could have a high tolerance for pain. There are doctors out there who believe in treating the pain, but they are getting harder and harder to find, due to new federal regulations regarding the regulation of narcotics. Remember if you don't have pain all pain pills do is make you high and get you addicted. When you take your meds you should have no other side effects other than reduction in pain. I have taken up to 180mg of morphine a day 40mgs or so of percocet without any side affects and not much pain relief either. The key is take only what you need, normally during warm weather I take very little narcotics, whereas in the winter I take alot, which proves that you can take the narcs and not get addicted. The opiates will not make your back worse unless while taking them you futher injure yourself by doing things you aren't supposed to. Taking opiates takes discipline, you cannot do anything while taking the pain meds that you can't do without them, that is harder than it sounds, because you feel good and want to do the things you have been missing while in pain. As far as your depression goes, and you can't take amytriptilene, there are other anti-depressants that have the effect of raising your pain threshold and easing the depression. I take nortriptilene as I couldn't take amytriptilene. Possible diagnoses are several you need imaging studies performed, as a guess I would say one of the discs have ruptured, or the facet joints have worn to the point that your spine is no longer stable. What ever the reason you need to take it easy until you can be diagnosed. Talk to your doctor and be honest about your insurance situation, most doctors do some amount of pro-bono work, I would suspect that you can get some treatment that way until your insurance kicks in. Good luck and i'm sorry this is so long.