Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11005

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Moncrieff J.
In Debate: Are Antidepressants as Effective as Claimed? No, They Are Not Effective at All
Can J Psychiatry 2007 Feb; 52:(2):96–97
http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=328

Abstract:

Antidepressant drugs are claimed to have specific effects on depressive symptoms. It is assumed that they do this by acting on an abnormal brain state that gives rise to depression. In contrast, I suggest that there is no evidence for this position. The effects of antidepressants seen in depression trials can easily be accounted for by nonspecific pharmacologic and psychological actions.

Notes:

Free full text at Can J Psychiatry site

Links to rest of debate:

Are Antidepressants as Effective as Claimed? Yes, But . . .
Lakshmi Ravindran, Sidney H Kennedy
http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=325

Rebuttal: Depression Is Not a Brain Disease
Joanna Moncrieff
http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=329

Response to Dr Moncrieff
Lakshmi Ravindran, Sidney H Kennedy
http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=326

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909