Do antidepressants really work?

The Associated Press

Delta Burke has fought depression with the help of medication.

Featured Topic | Posted 27 weeks 2 days ago

Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said this week. The results shocked a generation of depression patients who have relied on antidepressants to help them overcome low times.

Are antidepressants a hoax? Or is there some other explanation for the study's results?

Ben likes: Science and sorrow

Sally Satel, M.D./American Enterprise Institute

This is a great concern, particularly for parents. Over the last decade, the numbers of children with bipolar illness and ADHD have exploded--or, more precisely, the rates of diagnoses for these diseases have skyrocketed. Yet how many of these children truly have a disorder? How many are simply exuberant kids who find themselves pushed over a diagnostic threshold by reacting normally to deprivation and chaos in their homes? As with depressed adults, misdiagnosing normal kids as disordered means they are needlessly medicated while precious mental health resources are diverted from children with genuine clinical needs.

In the end, diagnosing a population is a balancing act. Setting a threshold too low makes sick people out of normal ones, but compensatory efforts to raise the bar threaten to exclude people who truly are ill.

Joel likes: In the mind

Times Online (UK)

What is not warranted is a rush to judgment that these drugs are no good: policymakers and doctors should have sharply in mind that the people most likely to say that pills are pointless are the people who most need them. Nor should it be concluded that the drug companies concerned, which submitted both sets of trial reports to the licensing authorities in this country and the US, pulled a fast one. Trials do not necessarily go unpublished because the results do not “fit” with the hopes of the drug developer; the common reason is that, if results are abnormal, it quite often indicates that the sample was flawed. A study conflating both sets may also be flawed.

The armoury against mental illness is still small. Each weapon in it contains the priceless salve of hope. The need is not to jettison what exists, but to intensify the search for better cures.

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Submitted on May 7th, 2008 by Anonymous

Antidepressants are used commonly in medical and psychiatric practice. As a class, antidepressants have in common their ability to treat major depressive illness.

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Submitted on March 24th, 2008 by Anonymous

Antidepressants are the best stimulus in the process to empower depressed people to have positive thinking and raise themselves esteem, because at the beginning it is quite difficult to think about and do this. Taking anti-depressants helps a lot of people to shift their moods and then these medications give them the possibility to work on other therapies.

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Antidepressants

Submitted on March 1st, 2008 by Steve

As the director of Novus Medical Detox, I often see patients who are on alcohol or opioids, central nervous system depressants, also taking antidepressants. When they detox they find they don't need the antidepressants.

This is good news because a Swedish study showed that 52% of the 2006 suicides by women on antidepressants. Since antidepressants work no better than placebos and are less effective than exercise in dealing with depression.

There is a prescription drug epidemic and these are leaders in the list of terribe abuses.

Steve Hayes
http://novusdetox.com

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Oh what to do!

Submitted on February 28th, 2008 by Chuck_Johnson

On the one hand, there are a bunch of studies that say that a doctor is much more likely to proscribe a patient a drug that the patient asks for than one he does not.

On the other hand, the only way to fight that would be to restrict information to the patient.

What's the sensible policy?

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