Posted by Schess81 on September 10, 2007, at 0:25:56
In reply to News - Antidepressants Vindicated?, posted by jrbecker76 on September 8, 2007, at 21:40:40
What I have come to believe is that anti-depressants are a brilliant(and maybe even beneficial) way to package and sell the placebo effect; as long as we have a medical establishment that generally believes that these substances have an effect on the biology of depression, the lay person who trusts his doctor will always have a chance to benefit from the drug. Not because the AD actually targets the correct biological source of the depression, but because of his faith in modern medicine hes likely to benefit from a genuine placebo effect regardless.
What I believe Link is simply trying to argue is that if all popular ADs in the world were secretly replaced with sugar pills and no one was aware, the success rates of these pills would continue be the same. (Some comprehensive, impartial studies of big pharmas drug trials seem to imply this)
Now the deal with the black box- less people are taking their ADs; (placebo pills, if you will, for the sake of arguement) Because they are afraid of the suicidal side effects, they miss out on the placebo therapy they might have received had they taken the drugs. In other words, according to the data, it could be argued that the while the ADs might increase suicides in some cases, the incidence of the placebo effect is far greater and is preventing far more suicides.
This is not an argument that Major Depression is not biological or a genetically predisposed condition- it clearly is in my opinion. The question is whether these popular drugs are the result of weak science and biased drug company research, which is also part of what Linkage is trying to debate.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry may be actually stifling true innovation in the treatment of depression by endlessly developing "me too" drugs who's trials can easily be manipulated to show satisfactory effectiveness. They have been following the same paradigm for the last few decades with no real improvement in drug effectiveness- according to clinical trial data, new drugs are no more effective that the older tricyclics and such. Not only that, but no matter how different the modes of action are on these different drugs, when the trials come out they all seem to perform about the same...
All in all, I guess we are probably better off without the black box labels on our ADs [or prescription placebos- if I can call them that :p]
poster:Schess81
thread:781684
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070831/msgs/781932.html