I say that in the end it is each individual consumer of therapy and/or medication that must be the judge of what is working for that individual. If it’s not working, they need to try somebody/something else until hopefully they can find something that works.

It is clear from the data that relying on the quantitative studies isn’t going tell any individual what is going to work in their particular situation.

Upon further reflection, and seeing how most media outlets are spinning this story (exactly as the authors wrote), I find this the most troubling sentence in the study:

Given these data, there seems little evidence to support the prescription of antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed to provide benefit.

This simply is not true as the statement stands. The authors’ study did not look at *all* antidepressant medication, nor even all SSRIs. It also only looked at data at one point in time, the most recent study nearly 19 years ago.

It’s no wonder the media are taking the study at face value, based upon the authors’ own statements and publishing stories like, “Anti-depression drugs don’t work,” and “Depression drugs no better than placebo.” That’s not what this study actually showed, no matter what the authors say they showed.

This kind of fear-mongering and black-and-white, limited-attention span writing is what is so infuriating to watch. Out of more than 2 dozen articles I’ve read talking about this study, I could find not a single one that actually talked about the study’s limitations. Instead, it’s just all talking-heads — the authors on one side, the drug reps on the other. What about the “truth?”

A more interesting question, too, might be why does it take us nearly 20 years to learn about these things? This data has been available, so why has it taken so long to get at these findings?