The drugs do work: antidepressants are effective, study shows

A review from a cardiologist of the meta-analysis posted in the original post in this thread :

Fawning Coverage of New Antidepressants Review Masks Key Caveats

 

Just heard this on the news:
"
The Royal College of Psychiatrists challenged over burying of inconvenient antidepressant data

The following letter was sent, by email, at 2.26pm today:

To: Professor Wendy Burn, President – Royal College of Psychiatrists;
Professor David Baldwin, Chair, Psychopharmacology Committee – Royal College of
Psychiatrists.

February 28, 2018

Dear Professors Burn and Baldwin

On 24.2.2018 The Times published a letter signed by you, in your capacities as President, and Chair of the Psychopharmacology Committee, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP). In that letter you made the following claim: ‘We know that in the vast majority of patients, any unpleasant symptoms experienced on discontinuing antidepressants have resolved within two weeks of stopping treatment’

We believe that statement is not evidence-based, is incorrect and has misled the public on an important matter of public safety."

the rest here:
http://cepuk.org/2018/03/01/royal-c...ged-burying-inconvenient-antidepressant-data/

 

Another article
Royal College of Psychiatrists leaders accused of 'dangerous' and 'misleading' comments on antidepressant withdraw

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/...ments_on_antidepressant_withdrawal/?ref=fbshr

And Sir Simon himself, with his incomparable condescending tone:https://twitter.com/user/status/972380644335636480


I saw several tweets of people complaining of being classified as having "medically unexplained symptoms" when trying to withdraw from antidepressants.
What a convenient dust bin to avoid taking any responsabilty at any time...

 

"
The Horrific Effects of Not Being Believed

By most accounts Jose Mario Bergolio is a remarkable person. It came as a shock to his fans then a few months ago when he visiting Chile he came out against victims of child abuse. The issue centered on one bishop whom survivors of abuse fingered as complicit with what had happened. JMB obviously liked the man and took the position he was innocent until proven guilty.

When it comes to us, you have to believe in us but for us to believe in you we need proof.

This is the same dynamic as found in establishment (Royal College of Psychiatrists, APA, WPA and other physician organizations) responses to Drug Wrecks such as antidepressant dependence. The plural of anecdotes is not data, they say. We have the data, all you have is anecdotes.

When power is at play, those with power are innocent until proven guilty, those without it are guilty until proven innocent. It has been ever thus.

What the Chile case and the Antidepressant Withdrawal Saga bring out is the horrific consequences of not being believed."

"The New York Times recently ran an article on Antidepressant Dependence and Withdrawal. This was dissed by British College of Psychiatrist figures from Wendy Burn to Simon Wessely."

full article (quite short) here:
https://davidhealy.org/the-horrific-effects-of-not-being-believed/

 

It would be interesting to see who the major funders of this "study" were.

 

This link from post 1 : http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)32802-7.pdf

has info on all the contributors at the beginning, and some declarations of conflicts of interest at the end, that may be helpful.

 

Yup, big pharma galore:

 

As you were!
Antidepressants Work for Major Depression! Not so Fast

Written in Medscape by Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Translational Medicine-Neuroscience, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"The latest attempt to trick ourselves into believing that the past few decades of prescribing antidepressants has been an effective strategy comes from one of the most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet. The published meta-analysis' basic finding—since repeated all over the press—is that antidepressants work because they are all better than placebo. What they don't tell you is that they are hardly any better than placebo, and that the only drugs with clinically meaningful benefits are the ones that are used rarely today, the older tricyclic agents."

In the final paragraph he questions the validity of the Major Depressive Disorder concept itself:
"This conclusion puts aside the more important issue of the scientific validity of the MDD concept itself, which the authors ignore completely. Our profession seems devoted to believing that antidepressants "work." They don't, at least not for "MDD"."

He also says, " ... one has to go to page 142 of the appendix [in the Lancet] to find the real result of all this effort: This meta-analysis confirms the results of prior meta-analyses which found that antidepressants have small overall effects in "MDD" and do not provide major clinical benefit in general."

Why wasn't that rather critical bit of statistical info, showing that the effects of antidepressants are clinically meaningless, included in the body of the article?!

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticl...t_wir&uac=69945CY&spon=17&impID=1661939&faf=1

 

There is a Vox article i was planning on starting a thread on that comes the the same conclusion, been saving it till i can give it cognitive energy

Edit: I'll post it now and do replies later

Edit 2: Posted
https://www.s4me.info/threads/we-need-new-kinds-of-antidepressants-in-addition-to-pills.4777/

 

Happen to be reading this older 2018 study, great to see that there's already a S4ME thread for it.

Although this meta-analysis found an effect, for most antidepressants it was notably small. The paper states:

This is an overview from the supplementary material (page 150). For Prozac (Fluoxetine) the effect is only 0.23 standard deviations. So even if antidepressants work, it seems that on average they only have a small effect.

 

These arguments from the response by Joanna Moncrieff also make sense:

Challenging the new hype about antidepressants | Joanna Moncrieff

 

Wow to that third one down when I read the full article- it’s full of fallacy and straw men

but reading it today - tbf there was no excuse then as PACE had been reanalysed by then - his straw man ‘anyone saying CBt isn’t the best is suggesting a conspiracy theory of a CBT mafia’ looks scarily prescient that he was in the know and just trying to make it sound jokingly like a conspiracy theory

it’s incredibly sophist where he has a whole paragraph trying to suggest anyone who disagrees doesn’t get it's scientifically underpinned but then based his ‘evidence for it being scientific truth’ on ‘eminence’ by saying ‘because in the UK it’s the most serious scientists doing this CBT proof research’... guess who he thinks are 'scientists' for the purposes of this claim?

very strange article where I can’t tell if it’s someone deluded themselves or just happy to go so far to ‘persuade’ others that ‘there's nothing to see here’

 

That issue of wilful blindness (also wilful ignorance, callous indifference) seems to come up a lot for this area

if they aren’t all guilty of it themselves then there is an issue with accepting it in others to the level of it being culture that gets printed in articles without anyone blinking about how it comes across as disdain to patient feedback where it’s inconvenient and a methodological blind spot due to a belief in patient voice being to be ignored

interesting to see it having come up before for other things

 

Could amitriptyline and other trycyclic drugs make a person susceptible to insuline resistance and therefore susceptible to ME/CFS?

In my early 20's I was given those pills as a pacifier between two intake-sessions when I asked for assertiveness therapy. I had to wait 10 weeks or more.
I gained 5 kg in 5 weeks, even though playing volleyball, 2 trainings and a match weekly. After 5 weeks I stopped taking the pills.
Might that be enough to cause insuline resistance?

After that I had weight problems untill I was diagnosed with diabetes II at 61. I lost 15 kg back then and had no weight problem anymore.
Metformin works for diabetes and insuline resistance. I was never tested for insuline resistance.

Can trycyclics do more harm than good?