Posted on 02/19/2012 6:07:06 PM PST by MindBender26
(CBS News) Do antidepressants work? Since the introduction of Prozac in the 1980s, prescriptions for antidepressants have soared 400 percent, with 17 million Americans currently taking some form of the drug. But how much good is the medication itself doing? "The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people," says Harvard scientist Irving Kirsch. Will Kirsch's research, and the work of others, change the $11.3 billion antidepressant industry? Lesley Stahl investigates.
which lead to other hoaxes.
Here’s what happened to Rod Serling’s daughter after her bratty teenager read Sybil...
http://www.angryharry.com/reOneFamilysNightmare.htm
Before I got on meds I exercised, mostly jogging & calisthenics. I liked the endorphin. It also helped allay some of my hypochondria that stalked me between periods of depression.
Finally bit the bullet and the change was amazing.
Love those happy pills. Better living through chemistry!
Ah yes, a study by a psychologist, who is not credentialed to prescribe meds, and specifically a research psychologist, who is not charged with the responsibility of relieving the suffering of a long line of people who come to him in a practice setting each day.
Ideal meds for every person? Of course not. Game changers for a significant number who suffer greatly? You betcha!
“Game changers for a significant number who suffer greatly? You betcha!”
Yes, they certainly are.
http://jannel.se/suicide.psychiatricdrugs.pdf
Maybe Ron Paul is right - legalize Cocaine and Valium for OTC and it will solve the problems that the “voodoo” (we have no idea how they really work or what they do to you) drugs cannot.....
fabulous.
Excellant points.
And wonder how the study was done.
Big Pharma cured small pox in the US. Cured malaria world wide until that nut case that wrote Silent Spring and the governments banned DDT. In the 3rd world millions of children die of malaria now that would be living if DDT were allowed to be used.and her thesis was build on a lie of thin eagle eggs. What a joke Rachael Carson was and those that follow her line of thinking....
If you have children I am sure you get them their polio, diphtheria and pertussis medication. Those 3 are baby killers...When I was young there wasn't a Salk or Sabin vaccine for polio. You want to know horrible, research the effects of Polio.
Don't get the idea I think pharacuticals are all OK. Lives are saved, but I do believe that many medications cost too much and you can thank the government for making it so difficult to develop new medications. The food and drug administration are a joke many times....
If you get sick, don't go to the doctor, you will be supporting *big pharma*. Just hope what you have will not kill you and tough out your sickness alone..
You’re not the messenger; you’re the Head Cheerleader.
You are right, some of the response's on this thread are sophomoric, and by what they say, you know they don't know much about what they are talking about. Some even think the larger letters they use make them smarter...:O)
If the Harvard study said that Wellbutrin is an SSRI, it is useless.
Insulin has been around for decades,long before big-government/big-corporate criminal complex took over health care.
Give me one example of something the big-government/big corporate criminal complex does that is about anything except money.
>>Some of the problem is the primary care physicians simply do not investigate possible physical or neurological causes enough before sending patients to a Psychiatrist or prescribing antidepressants.<<
Spot ON!
In our office, my doctors prescribed tons of Non-chemical treatments. The big guy was the guy who was taking people off as many meds as he could.
All I’m saying is that CBS and even Harvard are pushing for Obama’s plan. Which is why I said, watch the other hand. There is a reason why they are stating that SSRIs are as effective as placebo. There are many other disorders treated with them. Depression is not the only one. And it’s a whole lot cheaper to tell someone that the problem can be cured with exercise than to actually research the right chemical as you did.
It's a $$ saving scheme from Obama & Co. It's the death panel's sister: misery panel.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/burzynski-the-movie-cancer-is-serious-business/
They prosecuted him multiple times, and judges excoriated the FDA multiple times for doing so. While he was in jail that patented drugs he had already patented, planning on him never getting out of jail.
I am all for medicine. I am completely against the big-government/big-corporate medical complex that is a cancer unto itself.
Did you even bother to read the Harvard study or watch the story?
I
For the pill-poppers here too lazy to read the study, here is the abstract, notes on the authors and the conclusions:
INVESTIGATORS:
Irving Kirsch1*, Brett J. Deacon2, Tania B. Huedo-Medina3, Alan Scoboria4, Thomas J. Moore5, Blair T. Johnson3
1 Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom, 2 University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, United States of America, 3 Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America, 4 Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, 5 Institute for Safe Medication Practices, Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Abstract
Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance. Yet, the efficacy of the antidepressants may also depend on the severity of initial depression scores. The purpose of this analysis is to establish the relation of baseline severity and antidepressant efficacy using a relevant dataset of published and unpublished clinical trials.
Methods and Findings
We obtained data on all clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the licensing of the four new-generation antidepressants for which full datasets were available. We then used meta-analytic techniques to assess linear and quadratic effects of initial severity on improvement scores for drug and placebo groups and on drug–placebo difference scores. Drug–placebo differences increased as a function of initial severity, rising from virtually no difference at moderate levels of initial depression to a relatively small difference for patients with very severe depression, reaching conventional criteria for clinical significance only for patients at the upper end of the very severely depressed category. Meta-regression analyses indicated that the relation of baseline severity and improvement was curvilinear in drug groups and showed a strong, negative linear component in placebo groups.
Conclusions
Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.
Editors’ Summary Top
Background.
Everyone feels miserable occasionally. But for some people—those with depression—these sad feelings last for months or years and interfere with daily life. Depression is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood. It affects one in six people at some time during their life, making them feel hopeless, worthless, unmotivated, even suicidal. Doctors measure the severity of depression using the “Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression” (HRSD), a 17–21 item questionnaire. The answers to each question are given a score and a total score for the questionnaire of more than 18 indicates severe depression. Mild depression is often treated with psychotherapy or talk therapy (for example, cognitive–behavioral therapy helps people to change negative ways of thinking and behaving). For more severe depression, current treatment is usually a combination of psychotherapy and an antidepressant drug, which is hypothesized to normalize the brain chemicals that affect mood. Antidepressants include “tricyclics,” “monoamine oxidases,” and “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs). SSRIs are the newest antidepressants and include fluoxetine, venlafaxine, nefazodone, and paroxetine.
Why Was This Study Done?
Although the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), and other licensing authorities have approved SSRIs for the treatment of depression, some doubts remain about their clinical efficacy. Before an antidepressant is approved for use in patients, it must undergo clinical trials that compare its ability to improve the HRSD scores of patients with that of a placebo, a dummy tablet that contains no drug. Each individual trial provides some information about the new drug’s effectiveness but additional information can be gained by combining the results of all the trials in a “meta-analysis,” a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. A previously published meta-analysis of the published and unpublished trials on SSRIs submitted to the FDA during licensing has indicated that these drugs have only a marginal clinical benefit. On average, the SSRIs improved the HRSD score of patients by 1.8 points more than the placebo, whereas NICE has defined a significant clinical benefit for antidepressants as a drug–placebo difference in the improvement of the HRSD score of 3 points. However, average improvement scores may obscure beneficial effects between different groups of patient, so in the meta-analysis in this paper, the researchers investigated whether the baseline severity of depression affects antidepressant efficacy.
What Did the Researchers Do and Find?
The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA for the licensing of fluoxetine, venlafaxine, nefazodone, and paroxetine. They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression. The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. 1Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants.
What Do These Findings Mean?
These findings suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-generation antidepressant medications to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have been ineffective. In addition, the finding that extremely depressed patients are less responsive to placebo than less severely depressed patients but have similar responses to antidepressants is a potentially important insight into how patients with depression respond to antidepressants and placebos that should be investigated further.
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