Depressing News About Antidepressants
Depressing News About Antidepressant
Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo. In fact, they may be worse.
It seems I am not alone in having moral qualms about blowing the whistle on antidepressants. That first analysis, in 1998, examined 38 manufacturer-sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw—as everyone else had—that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills—clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo—he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect. “We wondered, what’s going on?” recalls Kirsch, who is now at the University of Hull in England. “These are supposed to be wonder drugs and have huge effects.”
That is the great danger with company sponsored research on their drugs. Researchers want to be employed, they want future work so there is a temptation to shade the results so that the drugs look good. Millions of dollars are stake. The sad thing is that the consumer loses out. In effective drugs are promoted, side effect are hidden.
I would hope the revelation that antidepressants do not work that well would be encouraging news for people to make life changes on their own. Get up earlier in the morning and go for a walk, volunteer to work at a soup kitchen, exercise to the point of sweating 3 times a week, stop negative thinking, practice daily relaxation skills, etc. You can make yourself depressed……… so do what you need to do to make yourself happy.
Dr Tim Lowenstein (c) 2009 All Rights Reserved
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