Here's what you say: "However, the drugs do work, they just don't work very well in many cases."
Here's what the science says: "... antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."
Guess which source I plan to rely on until better evidence is uncovered?
One theory has it that the positive statistic among the severely depressed resulted from a dosage effect -- because of the required dosage, those specific test subjects couldn't be blinded to the fact that they were taking the experimental drug, not a placebo, therefore the experimental protocol was compromised.
> Additionally, the brain is complicated, and just because mice genetically depleted of serotonin do not show depression-like symptoms does not mean that toying with serotonin levels in a normal brain cannot alleviate depression. [emphasis added]
First, you're overlooking the fact that the studies that got SSRIs approved in the first place relied on animal studies using the same animals.
Second, imagine a scientist saying "... just because mice genetically depleted of serotonin do not show depression-like symptoms does not mean that toying with serotonin levels in a normal brain cannot alleviate depression." Surely you see the logical error you're making here -- the argument essentially says, "if it hasn't been disproven, then it might be true." It equates an absence of evidence, with evidence.
To a scientist, the guiding precept is that an idea is assumed to be false until supporting evidence appears. This is commonly known as the "null hypothesis".
To a pseudoscientist, the guiding precept is that an idea is assumed to be true until contradicting evidence appears. You have just aligned yourself with a pseudoscientist's outlook.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2011/...
Quote: "While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications."
This passage is particularly relevant to our exchange.
> In fact, antidepressant treatment does alleviate depression in mice ...
Not according to the FDA's meta-analysis quoted above. Shall I say it again? "... antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."
> ... and this may be related to their therapeutic action.
Apart from a well-documented Placebo effect, which therapeutic action are you alluding to? Don't you understand that the present literature, generated by investigators subject to critical review by many interested parties, argues that there is no clear clinical role for SSRIs? And that the most recent study calls into question the most basic assumption of this class of drug therapy, that depression and serotonin are correlated?
We have pharmaceutical companies advocating the use of drugs to alleviate depression on slim-to-no reliable evidence, we have studies that fail to show a correlation between depression and serotonin in the same animal population used in the original drug studies, and most important of all, we have a large population of depressed people who want to believe that psychiatry has an answer to their difficulties.
As it happens, there is no present reliable answer, but there are hopeful signs that lie in other directions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...
Quote: "As it turned out, 8 of the 12 patients he operated on, including Deanna, felt their depressions lift while suffering minimal side effects — an incredible rate of effectiveness in patients so immovably depressed. Nor did they just vaguely recover. Their scores on the Hamilton depression scale, a standard used to measure the severity of depression, fell from the soul-deadening high 20's to the single digits — essentially normal. They've re-engaged their families, resumed jobs and friendships, started businesses, taken up hobbies old and new, replanted dying gardens. They've regained the resilience that distinguishes the healthy from the depressed."
Is DBS a panacea? No, not at all. First, it's a lab experiment, not a therapy. It's risky and expensive. But it shows what might result from an effort to actually understand what depression is, something that psychiatrists and psychologists seem uninterested in.