Antidepressants, for whose benefit?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication

Although patients get better when they take antidepressants, they also get better when they take a placebo, and the difference in improvement is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments

It's so surprising that many clinical studies are unpublished by the drug companies.

Read the Time article, Antidepressants Hardly Help and another at the Independent, The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy