Antidepressants aren't much better than sugar pills

>First off, if you’re absolutely sure you want to take an SSRI, take Lexapro. It’s pretty clearly safer and stronger than any other SSRI.

>GlacierMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

It's an interesting article otherwise, though the comparison to placebo as a measure of efficacy was new to me. I've always suspected acetaminophen was a gamble, but I had no idea it was so statistically ineffective.

The title should state SSRIs and not antidepressants as there are numerous drug types that can be considered antidepressant (e.g. SNRI, NASSA, tricyclic)

The interesting story is often that placebos work so well. According to the article: A typical participant in a depression study can expect to shave 9 points off their HAMD-D score—just by taking a sugar pill. In contrast, the group taking the actual SSRI might improve by around 10 points, so the effect of the treatments is dwarfed by the placebo effect.

p(benefit) is an awful way of looking at these medications. Yes, if you pull a random medication off the shelf and try it on someone at random, of course you'll have a terrible result! Go ahead, walk into the pharmacy and try a random medication off the wall! I dare you! But if you find the right one it is life-changing. And there are enough of them out there that each one only needs to be a hair better than random for it to be unlikely that none of them work. Same math that powers techniques like random forests. I don't know what the numbers are, but if you look at p(any medication working) instead of p(this medication working), it's damn sure not sugar-pill statistics.

Title is dangerously misleading.

I like how it ends with medical advice and then immediately follows with a disclaimer that they don’t give medical advice.