Anti depressants and Placebos

A lot of the criticism of alternative and complementary medicine is of the kind it works as a placebo - people get well because they think they will.

This view seems to be held very rarely about main stream medicine. This new article in PLOS on the effectiveness of the new generation oif anti-depressants is therefore a timely reminder that placebos are at work in main stream 'scientific' medicine too.

The editor of the journal summaries the findings in this way:

"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."

Read the editor's summary Read the full article