Anti-depressants can't cure sadness

Big Pharma caught in thier marketing schemes

I've been telling you for so long about the over-prescription of antidepressant medication that at times it's made me, well … depressed. But finally, a new study has been released that's put a smile on my face. Because nothing makes me smile like saying, "I told you so!"

According to research out of the University of Hull in the UK, antidepressant medications are only effective on those patients with severe cases of depression. Subjects in the study who suffered only from mild depression responded just as well to placebos as they did to various antidepressant medications such as Prozac.

I've been saying for years that depression is the most over-diagnosed (and, consequently, misdiagnosed) ailment in American society. Over the years, the line between true, clinical depression and, for want of a better term, "feeling down in the dumps," has been blurred to the point where it's almost vanished. The result is that doctors are handing out Prozac prescriptions to everyone with a mere case of the blues, and creating, to borrow from the title of a bestselling book, Prozac Nation. This new study merely backs up what I've long suspected: that most of these "depressed" patients don't really have anything clinically wrong with them.

The study's lead researcher, Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, said that "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." Kirsch added that "this means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments."

This led the Kirsch and the other researchers to conclude that there's basically no reason to prescribe antidepressants to anyone but the most severely depressed patients. Which is, of course, the absolute correct conclusion to draw – and one that, quite frankly, I think could have and should have been drawn long ago by responsible people in the medical community. And I think it's a conclusion that could easily have been drawn without a protracted study.

I'm very happy that this study has drawn this conclusion, but like so many logical conclusions it must now swim upstream against Big Pharma's tireless efforts to push these antidepressants as cure-alls to the American populace. Just think of all the TV commercials you've seen advertising antidepressant drugs such as Paxil. When you realize that these drugs only benefit people with severe depression, doesn't it seem absurd to hawk them to one and all in prime time? If you're clinically depressed, are you really in the correct state of mind to even respond to a TV ad? Of course, this matters little to the pharmaceutical companies because they have a lot more money than any given supreme being, and will stop at nothing to create more buyers for their products – whether those buyers need their products or not.

But there's something even more depressing to consider.

What's more depressing is that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been complicit in the spread and needless prescribing of psychotropic drugs because their own diagnostic manual doesn't adequately differentiate clinical depression from normal feelings of profound sadness (except in the case of bereaved patients). Nowadays, "depression" is all but formally diagnosed at school nurses offices and university health centers using ridiculously simple checklists, which don't take life events into proper account (seriously – has anyone ever encountered a teenager or college kid who isn't "depressed" at some point?).

As a result, some studies have suggested that of the more than 30 million Americans that have been reported to suffer from depression at some point in their lives, as many as a quarter of this number may have been misdiagnosed and needlessly medicated. Which ads up to about 7.5 million more buyers for Big Pharma products.

And don't forget that antidepressant medications are often the pharmaceutical equivalent of "bringing out the big guns." And that means that many of these drugs can have serious side effects that can be difficult to wrestle with on their own. Prozac alone has side effects that include nausea, insomnia, anxiety, and anorexia. Not to mention sexual dysfunctions such as impotence. Imagine how those side effects could make you feel if you thought you were depressed BEFORE you started taking Prozac!

And it's not just because of Big Pharma and the APA. Because they've been taught to believe that these drugs will solve their problems, patients now expect to go to their doctors crying "depression" and walking out the door with a script for the "happy pills" of their choice. Unfortunately, the doctors seem to be all-to-willing to comply.

All of this means that although this study by Kirsch and his colleagues is spelling out a very important truth, this truth may go unheeded. At the very least, this study faces a long, upstream swim toward acceptance in today's prescription-happy culture. In spite of the fact that the study suggests that there should be a more tailored approach to the treatment of depression – and that each individual case must be treated as unique – this isn't likely to happen overnight.

Just remember that just because you're sad, it doesn't necessarily mean you're depressed. Depression has become its own strange badge of honor in today's society. There's nothing glamorous about it. People should be happy that they're merely sad, and the medical community should do a better job of teaching misguided patients to recognize themselves as such. "Clinically depressed" is a badge that no one should want to wear.

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.