A startling study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month demonstrates strong evidence that antidepressants may be no more effective than placebos in alleviating depression.
The mental health community, which is already beset with cultural stigmas and taboos, just seized collectively.
The study used meta-analysis in evaluating past clinical trials both published and unpublished and discovered that about “82 percent of the response to antidepressants … had also been achieved by a dummy pill,” according to Newsweek.
Apparently, about 40 percent of clinical trials with antidepressants had never been published — about twice the average for other classes of drugs. The unpublished trials were the ones that “had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug,” said Irving Kitsch, one of the authors of the study and a psychology researcher at the University of Connecticut, in the Newsweek interview.
Seems like a lot of unpublished results.
Oh, and the number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, up to 27 million, or 10 percent, in 2005, USA Today reported.
Furthermore, the new study found that only in the cases of the most severe depression do antidepressants have a clinically significant effect. Otherwise, the simple “placebo effect” — initiated by thinking you’re taking a magic pill and having high expectations that it will work — does the job. Outside extreme cases, dummy pills have the same efficacy as the wallet-burning wonder drugs touted by billion-dollar drug companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline.
These same companies refuse to acknowledge the possibility that their product might not be the reason patients feel better — that the notion of something helping is a powerful vehicle toward recovery, even if the something is really nothing at all.
On the heels of controversial Supreme Court ruling that the First Amendment allows corporations to donate to political campaigns without restriction, this study and its implications are especially disconcerting. Kirsch suggests many experts within the psychotherapy field have known for a while of the suspect efficacy of antidepressants, yet Americans continue to up their doses of Prozac and Zoloft even as drug prices persistently rise in step because they believe — falsely — that they’re taking a cure.
Is corporate greed keeping us medicated on drugs that don’t really do anything? Or is paying for a miracle mirage the only way to remedy depression?
The results of this study provide a perplexing catch-22. By continuing to medicate America with pills that mostly don’t do anything, drug companies increase their profits and clout while still having a positive, if illusionary, end result. Fighting these companies and their drugs would liberate patients from the falsities of their care, but would jeopardize mental health.
These revelations will result in a more vigorous clamoring from mental health skeptics claiming that depression is not a real disease.
But despite any ethical conundrums pitting truth against result, depression is real. Whether or not it is a chemical imbalance that can be treated by a wonder pill or something contrived entirely by one’s own psyche, or both, is a moot point, because it terrorizes millions of Americans every day.
What does matter is our need to change the way we collectively approach mental health treatment in America.
Dustin thinks 1984 is becoming a reality. Bring him back to 2010 at dustin.volz@asu.edu
