Do Antidepressant Drugs Really Work? (A: As well as sugar pills)
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Quoting from a more recent (2014) scientific article on the issue, "Are antidepressants clinically useful? Conclusion of a decade of debate" at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4102296/ (the key paragraph is at the end, but I provide the first few paragraphs for context):
> During the last decade, a number of meta-analyses have questioned the clinical usefulness of antidepressants, and exposed a significant publication bias and low effect size in comparison to placebo 1–9. The most important implication has been that antidepressants might not have any effect at all in mildly depressed patients 1,4,5. Several authors and agencies, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), have suggested the utilization of “alternative” treatment options (e.g., exercise and psychotherapy) in mildly depressed patients, and pharmacotherapy only for the most severe cases. An immediate consequence of this is that patients suffering from mild depression may be deprived from receiving antidepressants.
> The Kirsch hypothesis concerning depression 10,11 is that there is a response which lies on a continuum from no intervention at all (e.g., waiting lists) to neutral placebo, then to active and augmented placebo including psychotherapy, and finally to antidepressants, which exert a slightly higher efficacy probably because blinding is imperfect due to side effects (enhanced placebo). This hypothesis has triggered much interest from the mass media and from intellects outside the mental health area, often with a biased and ideologically loaded approach 12.
> Two early efforts to re-analyze the Kirsch data set using different methodological approaches 15,16 independently reported results quite similar between them but different from those published by Kirsch. A recent multi-meta-analysis 17 utilized the Kirsch et al dataset and concluded that the most probable effect size of antidepressants relative to placebo is 0.34 (0.27-0.42) and that there is no significant effect of the initial severity of depression.
...
> The series of meta-analyses performed during the last decade made antidepressants perhaps the best meta-analytically studied class of drugs in the whole of medicine. The results of the recent multi-meta-analysis is likely to close the debate, suggesting that antidepressants are clearly superior to placebo and that their efficacy is unrelated to the initial severity of depression. Thus, there seems to be no scientific ground not to use antidepressants in mildly depressed patients.
(Emphasis mine.)