Addressing placebo: Cochrane finds antidepressants are effective for dysthymia

Psychotropic medications are approx. as effective as other medications for other conditions
Putting the efficacy of psychiatric and general medicine medication into perspective: review of meta-analyses | The British Journal of Psychiatry

Psychotropic medications improves outcomes
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...&dopt=Abstract

People with mental health conditions have worse life expectancy
Life expectancy at birth and all-cause mortality among people with personality disorder. - PubMed - NCBI

And again
Mortality of patients with mood disorders: follow-up over 34-38 years. - PubMed - NCBI

Those studies DID address who funded. These are NOT biased studies unless you can prove somehow they are? That was fun though BudFox.

I hope your non medication approach works for you. I hope that functional medicine is a smashing success. I do not get pleasure out of seeing other people suffer, quite the opposite. I am pretty sure my clients in the law and in medicine share our desire to see a good outcome.

I can say that my approach has worked for me. I am no longer young, I am close to half way through my life and now I think I wasted my time looking for mysterious 'other' medical conditions. My mood is now the best it has ever been. I have a good idea of what my life would be like without medications (if I were alive at all) and it does not match your opinions. But I imagine you are not satisfied. All I can say is quite often I have found that what I believe now is not the same as it was 5 years ago. So lets talk again in 5 years.

This thread is about dysthymia and the Cochrane Systematic review of it, I would like to get it back on track. Does anyone else here have a meta analysis or systematic review that shows that medications do not work for dysthymia? Because I have not seen any myself. My experience has been that medications do work for the condition. Does anyone else want to share their experience?

Unfortunately, this thread seems to be a debate thread which is something that this site is not designed for (except minimally in Current Events forum). We are not here to debate whether meds are affective or not. This is a support site, we support those who struggle with mental illness and disorders in which ever way they are working on their healing. Everyone has their own path to travel, debating those paths is not supportive.

At this time, this thread is being closed. Please do not create another thread to debate this matter.