Research study says Antidepressant drugs don’t work

ok ita all over the uk news and papers today saying Antidepressent don't work see below!
i think they can help in some situations

what you all think?

New-generation antidepressants such as Prozac work no better than dummy pills on many depressed people, new research suggests.

A review of clinical trials found they had no more effect than a placebo for mildly depressed patients and for most people suffering severe depression.

Even trials suggesting benefit for severely depressed people did not provide evidence of clear clinical benefit, research- ers said.

Dr Tim Kendall, deputy director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Research Unit, said the findings were "fantastically important".

A group of experts, led by Professor Irving Kirsch, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Hull, analysed 47 clinical trials using data released under Freedom of Information rules by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The researchers looked at four commonly-used antidepressants and the clinical trials submitted to gain licensing approval.

They included antidepressants regularly prescribed in the UK, including fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Efexor) and paroxetine (Seroxat).

They found little evidence of benefit when analysing both unpublished and published data from the drug companies.

Furthermore, the seemingly good results for very severely depressed pat- ients came from the fact a patient's response to the dummy pill decreased rather than any notable increase in their response to antidepressants.

"Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients," the researchers said.

The researchers said their study was one of the most thorough investigations into the efficacy of new generation antidepressants.

The research was published in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine.

They're not saying the drugs ARE placebo, but that they generally don't work any better than placebo.

Many of these studies had been swept under the carpet and not published because they had shown negative results. It was only thanks to recent freedom of information acts that these researchers gained access to them.

I've been telling people for quite a while that studies can be biased and flawed, and that the studies which are published are cherry-picked. I've been called paranoid over and over. I also know many people who had no benefit from the drugs and whose lives were made hell by them.

I wasn't going to talk about this here because I had no desire to stir things up. But since someone else mentioned it . . . it has to be said that this story all over the place in the mainstream media brightened my morning. Finally the truth is starting to come out.