psychotherapy:

A really great write-up that follows up with some legitimate questions about the study/article I posted a few minutes ago from Newsweek…

Imagine there was a nasty disease that affected 1 in 100 people. And imagine that someone invented a drug which treated it reasonably well. Good work, surely.

Now imagine that, for some reason, people decided that 10% of the population need to be taking this drug, instead of 1%. So sales of the drug sky-rocket. Eventually some clever person comes along and asks “This is one of the biggest selling drugs in the world - but does it work?” They look into it, and find that it doesn’t work very well at all. For about 9 out of 10 people, it’s completely useless! What a crap drug…

Of course the drug hasn’t changed, and what’s crap was the decision to prescribe it to so many people…

…My personal interpretation of results like those of Fournier et al is this: antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of depression that they were originally used for, after all, because the first antidepressants arrived in 1953, and modern antidepressants like Prozac target the same neurotransmitter systems.

Yet in recent years “clinical depression” has become a much broader term. Many people attribute this to marketing on the part of pharmaceutical companies. Whatever the cause, it’s almost certain that many people are now being prescribed antidepressants for emotional and personal issues which wouldn’t have been considered medical illnesses until quite recently. Antidepressants also have a long history of use for other conditions, like OCD, but this is a separate issue.