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Anti-depressants: Major study finds they work
Scientists say they have settled one of medicine's biggest debates after a huge study found that anti-depressants work. The study, which analysed data from 522 trials involving 116,477 people, found 21 common anti-depressants were all more effective at reducing symptoms of acute depression than dummy pills. But it also showed big differences in how effective each drug is.
The authors of the report, published in the Lancet [open, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32802-7] [DX], said it showed many more people could benefit from the drugs. There were 64.7 million prescriptions for the drugs in England in 2016 - more than double the 31 million in 2006 - but there has been a debate about how effective they are, with some trial[s] suggesting they are no better than placebos. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said the study "finally puts to bed the controversy on anti-depressants".
The so-called meta-analysis, which involved unpublished data in addition to the information from the 522 clinical trials involving the short-term treatment of acute depression in adults, found the medications were all more effective than placebos. However, the study found they ranged from being a third more effective than a placebo to more than twice as effective.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:04AM (11 children)
Nobody with depression should avoid anti-depressants because they believe they "don't work."
From personal experience, they help. If I said to you they are an 80 to 90 pct cure, would that not be good enough? You have nothing to lose by trying them. An honest try for one month.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:35AM (2 children)
Make sure you understand the side effects of the one you are going to try first. In some cases impotence and anhedonia can be worse than the depression itself, obviously depending on the severity of the depression. These symptoms don't stop in all cases when the medication is discontinued as well. Take care.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:41AM (1 child)
I was prescribed an SSRI anti-depressant drug when I was having panic attacks. The biggest drawback was they completely blocked my kundalini energy awareness and killed off the benefits of tantric energy practice. This was the ultimate drawback, and I absolutely loathed taking them. I could still have conventional (ejaculatory) orgasms, but even those felt greatly much less pleasurable. I weened myself off, then started some energetic grounding practices that resolved the panic attacks. Regular orgasms came back to full pleasure after a month or two. But, unfortunately it took a couple of years before my kundalini energy returned.
I can't remember which SSRI it was, but holy shit, that was definitely a case of the cure being worse than the problem.
Once you've gone down the tantra/kundalini path, ejaculation drains your energy away and stops you getting to the even greater levels of tantric pleasure. It actually made me depressed to think that the SSRI had broken me, and that I might only ever be able to have ejaculatory orgasms from then on. Fortunately, a couple of years later I was back to normal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @07:06PM
My wife was prescribed a low dose of SSRI for her anxiety and now she no longer has the crippling attacks. She also feels fine otherwise.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @03:46AM
Consider these two test results:
1) 100 subjects, placebo: 60 are cured, drug A: 90 are cured.
2) 100 subjects, placebo: 2 are cured, drug B: 3 are cured.
Both can be framed as "50% more effective" than placebo, but they're very different results.
Rewording as "Drug A is useless 10% of the time, placebo is useless 40% of the time" and "Drug B is useless 97% of the time, placebo 98%" leads to a conclusion that A is 4 times less useless, and B is barely less useless, and we can differentiate between the two cases more easily.
Of course, you can object to measuring uselessness. So let's measure usefulness again, but with a different perspective. You could arrgue that 60 of drug A's 90 would have been cured by placebo effect anyway, so actually it only cured 30 out of the remaining 40. B only cured 1 in 98. So again, we can distinguish between the two.
To mix things up even further, serious medical research normally doesn't frame the results in any of these three ways!
The typical measure used in the real world is "number of subjects treated in order to affect one cure", which puts A at 1.11, and B at 33.3. Again, clearly distinguishable.
So I posit that "N% more effective than" is utterly meaningless, yet it's the thin that is most often claimed in publicity materials for such studies.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @10:36AM (6 children)
The long lists of side-effects would like a word with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:22PM (5 children)
The side effects of depression are quite debilitating too. Sometimes, it's fatal.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Friday February 23 2018, @06:04PM (4 children)
True, but saying "you have nothing to lose by trying them" is wrong. I have boners and bone density, and I'd like to keep both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @07:03PM (3 children)
You are not going to lose your boners or bone density in a single month.
This is what I originally posted: try it for one month. See if the medicine "get you over the hump" of your depression. No one is saying you have to take it for the rest of your life. Just getting out of the depths of depression can be the enabling factor that lets you begin to address your depression possibly in other, non-medical ways.
I think you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Friday February 23 2018, @07:45PM (2 children)
No, I'm being pedantic. Your quoted statement was simply incorrect, find better wording next time. I recognise that the trade-off/gamble is worth it in some cases, but we can't honestly pretend that you have nothing to lose. Loss of bone density is something that happens on a continuum, and I have no reason to believe that it can't happen at some scale in the first month of use. Loss of boners is sometimes permanent. If you have data showing that no negative side-effects have been demonstrated in the first month of use I'll cede the point, but until then I'll keep being a pedant who understands that negative side-effects of SSRIs are well documented.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:42AM (1 child)
Nobody seems to argue that taking magic mushrooms, just once, might alter one's mind and even be an effective depression treatment for some. This is because of changing the mind, regardless of mechanism. Otherwise nothing would be different after.
Why then would it be hard to imagine that trying an SSRI *once* might have long-lasting or permanent effects?
Some people have schizophrenia precipitated by a single cocaine use event.
Why then should a month's application of strong mental medicine not possibly precipitate an illness?
GP sounds like the worst of contemporary doctors. "Here, try this, it's got 10% better cure rates on the thing we're discussing than placebo, and we'll see you in two weeks to prescribe drugs for the side-effects."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:45PM
I assume you don't take *any* medicine then because they all *might* have a side effect.
Have fun treating yourself with spring water baths and healing crystals.