Meredith Asher
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

I think the current medical research standards and methodology are inadequate to answer this question conclusively. Depression, its causes, and its mechanism of action are not well understood yet — due to the nature of the phenomenon, and not through any deficiency of medical science. So, the traditional double-blind Product Vs. Placebo study design will never paint a complete picture.

I’m speaking as someone who takes antidepressants every day. I can’t even say they gave me my life *back* — they gave me a life I couldn’t manage to put together before. Without them, I wouldn’t have a career, and I may not have been able to manage a stable long-term partnership. But I know several people who saw no improvement with the therapy I take, and only stabilized when they switched to another therapy or combination of therapies.

I know this is anecdotal and difficult to prove clinically, but it’s hard to dispute, observationally, that there is no one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical intervention for something as complex as mental illness. Antidepressants aren’t ibuprofen.

I think part of the problem is that it’s common for antidepressant medications to be prescribed by a primary care doctor, rather than a specialist. Primary care doctors can’t be specialists in everything, and the result is overgeneralization of certain symptom sets, non-recognition of more subtle indicators of, say, someone with a learning disability rather than generalized clinical depression, and incomplete knowledge of interactions, off-label uses, etc that a specialist would have.

These kinds of headlines worry me. Of course it’s necessary to question scientific assumptions, but there are already so many people who think all antidepressants are a sham and that anyone who takes them “just won’t do the work” of therapy, meditation, regular exercise, and so on. That they just need to buck up, quit whining, and get to work. Articles like this can be read in a way that supports the misunderstanding that depression is “all in your head.” It’s not.

    Meredith Asher

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