[pachyderm]

Do Antidepressants Really Work? - The New York Times

A study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One aimed to close this knowledge gap by comparing, over the course of two years, the changes in quality of life reported by Americans with depression who took antidepressants versus the changes reported by those with the same diagnosis who did not take the medications.

...

The paper found no significant differences in the changes in quality of life reported by the two groups, which suggests that antidepressant drugs may not improve long-term quality of life. ...

[Yaowen]

Interesting. I would have to read the original research. Sadly I cannot read the NY Times article because of a pay-wall.

Research studies are vital but can be tricky things. All research is subject to limitations and caveats. What was the duration of the study? What was the size of the study. Were there confounding factors? What level of objectivity can be assigned to the study?

How does the study relate to other studies? Do they conflict in their conclusions? Were there biases involved? Sometimes biases can be quite subtle. Sometimes quite apparent. Was there important information that was excluded from the study by design?

What was the nature of the study. Does real life clinical experience jive or not jive with the research?

Sometimes a whole body of research can be upended by new discoveries. These are just a few of the limitations of research. Who funded the research and what interests do they have? There are difficulties involved with the logic of research in that logical induction can never lead to certitude but only probability and then there is the problem that the laws of probability themselves are only probable.

Logic itself it fraught with difficulties. The logical positivists maintain that nothing is certain except what could be verified empirically by the human senses or technological extensions of those sense [microscopes and such]. Unfortunately the Law of Verifiability itself cannot be verified empirically.

I am not trying to be killjoy here. Obviously we are blessed to have science and technology and I wouldn't want to live without them. What a dark world it would be. But I think we need to keep some awareness of the limits involved in being finite beings. It is a struggle to reduce our own biases to the level where we can say that we are fair-minded individuals.

Hopefully there will be free availability of this new study so that one would not need access to a medical library to read and study it or have to pay for internet access to it. I will be eager to read it and try to factor in its conclusions with what I have already studied. I will try to be fair-minded and exercise some intellectual humility here and an ability to laugh myself and not take myself too seriously. Not always easy. Thank you so much for sharing this information! ! !

[Nammu]

They’ve been saying that for years now. That any reaction to AD is a placebo effect created by the negative side effects and the trouble with withdrawals causes people to think they must be helping.

[T4bbyCat]

Seems as though they could measure this precisely with brain scans. There are those comparisons between the brains of the depressed and not depressed, showing a clear difference in electrical activity. The pictures look pretty clear and compelling to me.

[modestlychee6463]

They work but it's best if they're taken around the same time closer to bedtime. Sometimes you might need to ask for increase in your dosage too.