WARNING!
This is an older article that may not reflect Dr. Mercola’s current view on this topic. Use our search engine to find Dr. Mercola’s latest position on any health topic.
Twenty-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) show that their benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they take a placebo.
More and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.
Research has found that patients do improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors. This improvement is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work.
But when researchers compare the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills, they find that the difference is minuscule.
Nonetheless, the number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.