Antidepressants Effectiveness Debate
The cluster focuses on debates about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants for treating depression, often comparing them to placebo and citing studies on modest benefits, chemical imbalance theory, and alternatives like therapy or ketamine.
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It’s kinda interesting you say that because studies show that SSRIs are not much better than placebo for treating depression, and that therapy plus SSRIs is the best treatment available right now.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592645/
This might say more about the effectiveness of antidepressants than anything else.
Here's what you say: "However, the drugs do work, they just don't work very well in many cases."Here's what the science says: "... antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."Guess which source I plan to rely on until better evidence is uncovered?One theory has it that the positive statistic
You are forgetting about the number of people who die after taking antidepressants.https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3697/rr-4
Most medications DON'T work for most people. For example here[1] is a meta-analysis from 2004 of the top 6 antidepressants which finds that 80% of the effect is achieved by placebo, and the remaining effect is statistically, but not clinically, significant (that is, the effect size is tiny). Here[2] is another follow-up that shows that there may be effects only in the most severely-depressed patients. In addition the theoretical foundation of many drugs is lacking - the seratonin theory und
Do you have a link to research pointing at antidepressants being no better than placebo?
Many people with depression don’t improve on antidepressants so this seems of questionable accuracy.
The success rate of anti-depressants is closely comparable to sugar pills.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/
So it is now verboten to ask questions?SSRIs vs Untreated depression is a false dichotomy. There are many treatments for depression.
depression: have you tried turning it off and then back on again?tongue in cheek, but i think the more we learn about mechanism of action the more it’s not the worst 1st order approximation.