Here are excerpts of an article by Professor Irving Kirsch, a leading psychologist:
We spend more than £250 m a year on antidepressants in the UK - and it's a complete waste of money. They are not much better than sugar pills, they have nasty side - effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and they increase young people's risk of suicide.
New research shows they don't even work on the brain in the way we thought they did.
For years we were told depression was caused by low levels of a brain chemical called serotonin, and that antidepressants worked by boosting it. But an Australian study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that rather than low levels, depressed people might have double the normal amount in some parts of their brain.
I've been studying antidepressants for more than a decade, and I knew that if they worked at all, it wasn't by changing brain chemistry. The major reason you feel better when taking an antidepressant - maybe the only reason - is the placebo effect.
When I first published a paper back in 1998 saying that antidepressant drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat were not much better than a placebo, almost everyone thought it couldn't be true.
There was so much evidence they worked. Thousands of people claimed the drugs had turned their lives round. My colleagues said that I must have made a mistake: either I had looked at the wrong data, or I hadn't analysed it properly. In fact, what I'd done was to look at the research on antidepressants in a different way from everyone else. Other researchers were concentrating on how much better the drugs were than a placebo. What I was interested in was finding out how strong the placebo effect was in treating depression. I compared the placebo effect to having no treatment at all - no one had done that before.
We already knew that placebos could have a powerful effect in conditions such as pain, angina, ulcers and asthma.
Depression was an obvious next step, because when you are depressed you lose hope, and placebos give you hope. But I was flabbergasted by just how big the placebo effect was. Patients getting the drug improved: that was not surprising. But patients given the placebo also got better - and by almost the same amount. Most of the drug improvement was really a placebo effect. I decided the best way to convince people that antidepressants were largely placebos was to look at the drug companies' own data.
At the time, I was working at the University of Connecticut, so I used the Freedom of Information Act to force the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, which licenses drugs, to let me see all the trials the drug companies had run to get the most popular antidepressants approved. That's when I got another shock. More than half of the trials showed no difference at all between the drugs and the placebos - but most of those negative trials had never been published.
Heres the link to the rest of the story, its kinda long:
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...sugar-pills-work-just-well.html#ixzz0wvJk4xdL
