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A comment on The Final Nail in Psychiatry's Antidepressant Coffin. Parent comment

Re:The Final Nail in Psychiatry's Antidepressant Coffin by slibhb on Friday January 19, 2024 @11:45PM (#39064767)
It's not a crank article. It exaggerates but does include specific criticism of a certain influential study.

I'm fairly skeptical of SSRIs. Most psychiatrists still parrot the "your brain needs more serotonin" line which is not backed by substantial evidence. I think SSRIs probably "work" as active placebos (with side effects) but are vastly overprescribed.

Also, it's very hard to know if an antidepressant worked for you because we can't test the counterfactual.

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Re:The Final Nail in Psychiatry's Antidepressant Coffin by monero-xmr on Friday January 19, 2024 @11:49PM (#39064794)
SSRIs are not placebo. They are very powerful drugs. Increasing the dosage has more extreme effects. To call it placebo is a misunderstanding of statistics.

If a drug doesn’t work for 80% of people but works for 20% very well, it might be indistinguishable statistically from placebo. That doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

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