Some Depressing Facts about Antidepressant Research

If you are currently taking antidepressants and believe they work for you, you’re not going to like this at all. In fact, recent revelations publsihed by the New England Journal of Medicine seem to reveal that your belief in your antidepressant may well be the only reason it works for you.

Alternet.org covers the studies in the NEJM published on January 17, 2008 and I encourage you to read that article in full before you come back to this one. It ties together a chain of causality that is difficult to dismiss as mere alarm-mongering or conspiracy theory wackiness.

• The lead researcher was a former FDA medical reviewer with no ties (refreshingly enough) to the pharmaceutical industry.
• His team had to use the Freedom of Information Act to force the FDA to release studies done that were never published in scientific or medical journals. These studies, obviously, demonstrated lackluster results for antidepressants even though all the studies were biased to show positive results.
• “While 94 percent of antidepressant studies published in journals show antidepressants to be more effective than placebos, only 51 percent of all registered studies were determined by the FDA to show antidepressants superior to placebos.”
• “…in the majority of FDA drug-approval advisory meetings through 2000, half or more of the FDA advisers had conflicts of interest — financial relationships with drug companies.”

• “In addition to biased depression measurements and an absence of a true double blind control, the FDA also accepts antidepressant research in which subjects who respond favorably to placebos are weeded out from final trials.”
• Faith-based healing: “In 2004, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reported that among those depressed patients expecting an experimental antidepressant to be “very effective,” 90 percent had a positive response [...] while among those expecting the medication to be “somewhat effective,” only 33 percent had a positive response.”
• “As one might expect, drug companies do nothing to ensure that depressed people who have little or no faith in antidepressants are proportionately included in studies.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the implications here. For all the billions of dollars the pharmaceutical industry is raking in on these medications, it would appear they are less effective than remedies like St. John’s Wort or valerian in treating depression, two natural remedies among many with a long record of efficacy outside the reach of the USFDA — the very agency, funded by tax payer dollars, that the tax payers depend upon to protect them from fraudulent or harmful drugs. It would appear that money and influence have once again compromised public safety for the sake of corporate greed. What’s saddest of all are those who have relied on these drugs in “good faith” to help them battle debilitating mental and emotional disorders — only to find out in the end that it’s likely that simple faith would likely served them as well, and their pocket books better.