Vagus nerve stimulation is a new therapy for depression that may be better than the drugs

but the FDA recently decided not to approve it because of minor defects in test procedure

now there is another reason to approve it people who dont receive it will have to take drugs that may cause them to commit suicide.

There is no scientific proof that taking anti depressant drugs causes people to commit suicide. To prove this you would have to give an anti-depressant to people who did not have depression and find that a signifigantly higher number committed suicide than in your control group. I doubt such an experiment would happen in real life, because someone would have to take credit for making someone commit suicide, for a good cause. The real problem with anti-depressants is they don’t cure depression before the paitient commits suicide. When a psychiatrist starts anti-depressant therapy he tries one drug for 6 weeks. If the paitient gets better after taking that drug for 6 weeks, he is a lucky paitient. Some paitients may have to try many drugs before they find one that works. It takes 6 weeks for each drug, so it may take years for a paitient to find one that works. Actually “paitient” is a bad word to use for such a person, It’s hard to be paitient when you are suffering and you have spent many months waiting for a drug to work. Some patients who don’t want to wait anymore kill themselves, thereby putting themselves out of their misery, and proving that their mental illness was a real illness. If you really want to stop suicide you need to use a therapy that does’nt take so long to work, such as vagus nerve stimulation, E.C.T., or magnetic therapy, and after the patient has gotten some relief, then try the drugs.