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/

 

"
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/