The evidence in favour of antidepressants is terribly flawed | Aeon Essays

Your grief and guilt overwhelm you. You are so tired you cannot think straight. Your simple joys are lost in an invisible agony. You have pain in your head and back and stomach, real pain. The swamp of your soul suffocates you with despair. All this is your fault, you are worthless, and you might as well die. This is how depression can feel, though people’s experiences of it, including the severity of symptoms, can vary widely. This terrible disease affects about one person in 10 at some point in life and, to treat it, many millions of people have taken antidepressants. Unfortunately, we now have good reasons to think that antidepressants are not effective.

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The placebo effect is when patients improve merely as a result of the medical care they have received rather than as a result of the biochemical properties of their drug. The idea is that the mere expectation that you will get better after receiving medical care can itself contribute to you getting better. Some diseases are more responsive to placebo than others, and depression is one of the most placebo-responsive of all diseases.

Source: The evidence in favour of antidepressants is terribly flawed | Aeon Essays

In posting this link, I don’t want to minimize the suffering individuals experience with depression. Nevertheless, there are concerns raised here that anyone with an interest in the problem should consider. Part of the problem, one the author dismisses, is the “disease” model of depression. Some depression may be related to a physical problem, but the fact that “depression is one of the most placebo-responsive of all diseases,” should tip us off that something else is going on, most of the time.

If anti-depressants are less effective than thought, and side effects harmful, then re-thinking the topic is in order.

— Don Johnson