While articles debunking global warming may not typically follow the standard used for public release of scientific investigations, this news story does. It let's us know that Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work.The paper, published today in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine, is likely to have a significant impact on the prescribing of the drugs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) already recommends that counselling should be tried before doctors prescribe antidepressants. Kirsch, who was one of the consultants for the guidelines, says the new analysis 'would suggest that the prescription of antidepressant medications might be restricted even more'.While it quotes researchers and professionals, the primary source of information for the article comes from a peer reviewed scientific journal and involves data collected from multiple studies with double blinds. This way we can know with a reasonable degree of certainty that in most cases Prozac is shit worthless.
The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.
Which makes me happy. Bad news for corporations = antidepressant for Jake.
4 comments:
Can't resist...
I agree with the sentiment- antidepressants are not designed to alleviate the everyday unhappiness and apathy that has so pervasively infected the present population, nor should they be prescribed as such. However, I find the article infuriating for several reasons:
1. Because it's NOT NEWS. I'm too lazy to go find the original study, but it has been many years now that mental health professionals have known that antidepressants are not effective in isolation, but may be used in conjunction with or a supplement to cognitive behavioral therapy.
2. Because the headline is designed to feed the all-too-pervasive perception that depression and other mental illnesses are not legitimate disease processes that can be treated with medication.
3. Because it's far too easy to make statistics say just whatever it is that you want them to say. The study itself is a meta-analysis of existing clinical trial data from SSRIs, it may "break new ground" but it is far from exhaustive. Though SSRIs may have been introduced for the treatment of depression, they are now used to treat a wide range of other symptoms of psychological and neurological symptoms. The aim of this study was only to investigate the efficacy in persons with depression, however, the article is happy to generally vilify a whole class of potentially helpful medications.
We can all be glad that I don't prescribe medications; I'm one of the help-you-to-figure-out-how-to-pick-
yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-
type professionals. It would be hard to make a clinical decision when so much anecdotal evidence exists in contrast...
I'm more likely to ask, what's happening to make the placebo work so well?
In its defense, the article does point out that Prozac has a measurable advantage over placebos in extreme cases of depression. It makes the recommendation that anti-depressants be used where counseling has failed.
Except that the original study's authors speculate not that Prozac works in those cases, but that the placebo effect isn't strong enough to overcome the severity of the depression.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread. Perhaps I should take some Prozac for mood stabilization? Or impulse control?
Thank you both. I love it when this place is so informative.
In general, I'm very "anti-medication". Mostly it's 'cause they don't work on me. After my big surgery a few years back, they put me on morphine and vicadin. Neither provided any pain relief - they just made me dreadfully constipated. I stopped taking them and my comfort level increased dramatically.
There's exactly four medications that have ever proven more beneficial to me than simply laying down in a dark room:
1) Nyquil, which knocks me out inside 15 minutes, regardless of what symptoms I have. I know - lightweight.
2) Zithromax - that first pill had me bouncing off the walls. I'd been deathly ill, and then was wired an hour later and as a result too animated to sit still for 36 hours. It was hard forcing myself to take the rest of the pills.
3) Radiation Therapy. Unfortunately, when I get angry I now transform into 50-foot-woman who glows in the dark and shoots lasers from her ears.
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