Depression and Social anxiety disorder!!!

With thanks again to OverdoseAmerica.

Experiment. Four groups with SAD (its not a joke). Two groups got an SSRI antidepressants and two got placebo. One group taking placebo and one taking an SSRI got 8 15 minute chats with their doctor and home work to help to break thru social habits and fears. All four groups were treated for 24 weeks and monitored 52. All showed a significant improvement in first 24 weeks. The group that did best in the follow up 28 weeks was the placebo group with the chat sessions.

Three groups with depression - one got SSRI, one got an exercise programme and the last group got both SSRI and exercise. Six months post completion of treatment depression had recurred in 8% of the exercise group and more than 30% in the other two groups.

Swedish drug authorities gathered 42 published and unpublished papers on use of SSRIs in depression. Only 50% showed these drugs to be better than placebo

Evidence gathered by FDA shows SSRIs are no more effective than the older tricyclics. SSRIs are not even 10% more effective than placebo.

In mild depression nine out of ten studies show SSRIs are no more effective than placebo.

Tricyclics are very toxic in overdose. SSRIs aren't. However, more people die from suicide on SSRIs???? More commit suicide on these drugs than on placebo.

The one advantage of SSRIs is their 12% less side effects.

I personally (see rapid responses) have been studying depression in primary care for 5 years. When I started out I was flabbergasted to find the manipulation of trials and suppression of data that the drug companies had universally applied had totally skewed the outcomes, and that the evidence in favour of SSRI�s was virtually non existent. This was particularly brought home to me by the Cochrane meta�analysis which concluded that �differences between antidepressants and active placebo are small�(1), followed by the release of the 10 year data sets by the FDA for the four commonest anti- depressants when some researchers concluded that the difference (drug/placebo) was not clinically significant; indeed �medications must be interfering with responsiveness in at least some others who would fare better on placebo�(2). I am beginning to get a very bad feeling that similar things have been going on with statins as with SSRI's, and we are all dancing to big pharmas tune again here. Please someone, reassure me that this massive statin intervention has a firmer basis than it appears to. Someone please reassure me that there are more studies in the elderly with statins that do show a marked reduction in mortality. If no-one can reassure us of this, I think we all need to be very worried indeed.