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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Homeopaths and faith healers say exactly the same thing. Personal anecdotes are not data.

Most mental health disorders are inherently self-limiting and will disappear without any treatment, which makes psychiatry look far more effective than it really is. If you're depressed, you're statistically likely to not be depressed in six months time, regardless of whether you seek treatment or not. In these circumstances, it's easy for a completely ineffective treatment to look like a miracle cure. The key outcome measures for most psychiatric drug trials are episode duration and likelihood of relapse, which speaks volumes.

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> Most mental health disorders are inherently self-limiting and will disappear without any treatment

Source?

Most health disorders are self-limiting. By and large, the body heals itself, except when it doesn't.

From Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_episode:

If left untreated, a typical major depressive episode may last for about six months, while about 20% of these episodes can last two years or more, with 50% of depressive episodes ending spontaneously.

I can probably find you an article reference if you want. But I have learned this kind of research findings in psychology class.

There's also a such thing as chronic depression, and reason to think that major depression follows a relapsing-remitting course, at least in some people, and may turn into or be a warning sign of developing chronic depression.

Which says nothing about the effectiveness of psychiatric treatments. But it does argue for aggressive early treatment, whatever that might mean, in the hope of halting the progression before it could become chronic.

Mental illness is fundamentally hard to study scientifically, and I'm not convinced that any of the treatments we have actually work. But it's humane to make the attempt.

>Personal anecdotes are not data.

Um, yes they are. Are they reliable data? I'm not convinced they're not.

>If you're depressed, you're statistically likely to not be depressed in six months time, regardless of whether you seek treatment or not. In these circumstances, it's easy for a completely ineffective treatment to look like a miracle cure.

Because never in the history of medicine has a treatment for depression had an immediate effect?

No depression treatment is claimed to have an immediate effect. If you start taking SSRIs and immediately feel better, it's pure placebo - the marketers of those drugs say that SSRIs take weeks to show any noticeable effect.

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