A quote: "Well, people are arguing the efficacy of treatment for depression on the Internet. Quite honestly, this dismays me. The matter has been studied. There are papers. There are books. There are (pardon me while I appeal to authority) people who spend their careers arguing for and against certain treatment modalities."
You would do well to avoid appeals to authority in scientific matters. It happens that a recent meta-analysis demonstrates that depression medications simply do not work for the majority of people.
It seems that, over the years, Big Pharma funded a lot of studies of depression medications, and systematically threw out those that didn't support their position:
A quote: "Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."
Read the last sentence carefully. It means the depression medications don't work any better than placebos for the majority of people. This is perhaps the best-kept secret in psychology.
The nest time you're tempted to say, "The matter has been studied. There are papers. There are books", remember this study -- it summarizes all those papers and books, and shows that these drugs do not work.
Firstly, the authors still found a difference in effect depending on the severity of the depression of the presenting patient.
Which is exactly what one would expect.
Second, this paper is not without its critics (just look in the comments):
"Huedo-Medina et al report that decreasing placebo response with increasing baseline severity of depression is their paper’s “unique contribution”. However, it is clear that this is an artefact of using the standardised mean difference. Analyses using the raw HRSD scores reveal that mean placebo response remains constant with greater response to antidepressant treatment with increasing baseline severity".
Thirdly, you do a disservice to psychologist and psychiatrists if you believe they are further behind on their reading than either you or I.
> Firstly, the authors still found a difference in effect depending on the severity of the depression of the presenting patient.
Yes, and they came to the same conclusion that I stated in my original post -- for the majority of people, antidepression medications do not work. This is a fact that's being kept out of the public's view the the degree possible.
A quote: "Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have failed to provide a benefit."
> Second, this paper is not without its critics ...
And that is the way it should be. But until the critics perform their own studies of equal quality, the result stands. This is how science works -- authority means nothing -- evidence trumps eminence.
> Thirdly, you do a disservice to psychologist and psychiatrists if you believe they are further behind on their reading than either you or I.
Believe me when I tell you, based on my voluminous correspondence with psychiatrists and psychologists, they aren't very well-read at all on this topic. That is how they justify writing all those prescriptions for ineffective drugs.
You would do well to avoid appeals to authority in scientific matters. It happens that a recent meta-analysis demonstrates that depression medications simply do not work for the majority of people.
It seems that, over the years, Big Pharma funded a lot of studies of depression medications, and systematically threw out those that didn't support their position:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
A quote: "Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."
Read the last sentence carefully. It means the depression medications don't work any better than placebos for the majority of people. This is perhaps the best-kept secret in psychology.
The nest time you're tempted to say, "The matter has been studied. There are papers. There are books", remember this study -- it summarizes all those papers and books, and shows that these drugs do not work.