I don't know when the lawsuits will finally begin, but they're going to be epic.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Firstly it is making the fallacious assumption that the shift applies via a large improvement in extreme cases rather than a small improvement to each case.
Secondly, there are flaws in the study methodology. Depressive symptoms come and go by nature, and people seeking pharmacological treatment will more often than not be at a lower point in the cycle, so it is only natural that they will improve in time on average. There is also the problems with the fact that depression is assessed via self-reported questionnaires which have a ton of issues.
To say "The research has shown unequivocally that the benefits, such as they are, for the majority of people derive from the placebo effect" is unsupported by the evidence.
It's more about not having the tools at the time to effectively treat real conditions in people, and whether making people okay with things even if it robs them of other capacities was the only acceptable, pragmatic, and even compassionate choice.
I think the lawsuit will have many high bars, but at the very least I hope it begins the end of the practice of prescribing to children for behavior control.
Citation needed. And it most certainly has not showed that.
It's a great business model. Shady but effective.
The problem is it’s very easy to prescribe something and much harder to verify it’s working. Just look at everyone who genuinely believes in homeopathy etc that are dependent on the placebo effect. You hand out a drug and people say it’s making a difference in their life so you keep prescribing it.
very rarely?
>Findings
>We identified 28 552 citations and of these included 522 trials comprising 116 477 participants. In terms of efficacy, all antidepressants were more effective than placebo ...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
"We excluded ... trials that ... included 20% or more of participants with ... treatment-resistant depression"
And still the result is:
"46 (9%) of 522 trials were rated as high risk of bias, 380 (73%) trials as moderate, and 96 (18%) as low; and the certainty of evidence was moderate to very low."
And the cognitive bias is towards efficacy. We've raised and taught two generation of people who believe in a thoroughly defunct theory of 'chemical imbalance'. SSRIs are conceived from this idea and presented as evidence of this idea, but it simply does not hold up under scrutiny [1].
>"We excluded ... trials that ... included 20% or more of participants with ... treatment-resistant depression"
That seems reasonable, as long as 20% isn't the baseline level of "treatment-resistant depression". If you're going to do a search for all anti-depressants studies, you're bound to turn up some studies that are researching-treatment resistant depression. If you're trying to study how anti-depressants behave typically, it makes sense to exclude the extreme examples, just like if you're trying to study whether an anti-cancer medication works you want to exclude the cases where the patient was on his deathbed.
1 in 4 American adult women take anti-depressant drugs. Do they all have major depressive disorder?
As well as depressive disorders other than MDD.
What's your argument here exactly?
Given that women have to bear an utter majority of the workload summarized as "care work", anything from raising children over household chores to caring for elderly relatives, on top of female-specific health issues like painful periods or endometriosis (10% of women [1], and that is before under-diagnosis or late diagnosis comes into play [2]), it makes sense that a lot of women end up with depression-related symptoms. Other societal factors that increase load on women (like the drug crisis, absent fathers, rampant sexism and misogyny in society, the recent barrage of threats to womens' lives and reproductive health) also come as an additional risk factor.
Additionally, as women have entered the work force over the last decades for a number of reasons, it also makes sense they now have rising rates of work-related mental health issues like burnout and depression.
And what also must not be forgotten is a severe under-diagnosis for mental health in men. Barely half the men that self-report symptoms of depression or other mental health issues actually seek out help [3], my personal guess is that this is to a large degree because the historic image of "male-ness" outright ignores mental health issues and labels men that seek help for these as "weak", which has been shown for PTSD in var veterans. Women have it "easier" from social expectations, which may help to hide the fact that, were men equally invested in their mental health, they'd end up at the same ratio of depression!
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/endometrios...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicebroster/2020/08/27/why-it-...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/24346...