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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
A new study finds little difference between pill and placeboQuestion: Are antidepressants effective or ineffective?Answer: Yes!In my view, both these statements are true: Antidepressants do work. And antidepressants don’t work. Not to put too fine a Clintonian point on it, but determining whether antidepressants work depends on the definition of the word “work.” A controversial article just published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos for most depressed patients. Jay Fournier and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania aggregated individual patient data from six high-quality clinical trials and found that the superiority of antidepressants over placebo is clinically significant only for patients who are very severely depressed. For patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression, placebos work nearly as well as antidepressants.There have been at least four other review articles published in the last eight years that have come to similar conclusions about the limited clinical efficacy of antidepressants, and one of the study authors, psychologist Irving Kirsch, has recently published a book on the topic, provocatively entitled The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. The recent review articles questioning the clinical efficacy of antidepressants run counter to the received wisdom in the psychiatric community that antidepressants are highly effective. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that psychiatrist Peter Kramer wrote in his best-selling book Listening to Prozac that this miracle drug made patients “better than well.” Prozac was a Rock Star. Its extraordinary success even led to a photograph of the green and white capsule on the cover of Newsweek Magazine in 1990.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and
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