But the meds don't work...

[OldBoy]

Good grief.  People are still being paid to engage in this debate? (For URLs replace xx with pp, then copy and paste into your browser's address bar)

The drugs do work: antidepressants are effective, study shows
hxxps://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/21/the-drugs-do-work-antidepressants-are-effective-study-shows

Doctors hope study will put to rest doubts about the medicine, and help to address global under-treatment of depression

Sarah Boseley Health editor
Wed 21 Feb 2018 23.30 GMT

Antidepressants work – some more effectively than others – in treating depression, according to authors of a groundbreaking study which doctors hope will finally put to rest doubts about the controversial medicine.

Millions more people around the world should be prescribed pills or offered talking therapies, which work equally well for moderate to severe depression, say the doctors, noting that just one in six people receive proper treatment in the rich world – and one in 27 in the developing world.

...

The study published in The Lancet took six years, Cipriani said, and included all the published and unpublished data that the scientists could find. It was carried out by a team of international experts. They looked at results after eight weeks of more than 500 trials involving either a drug versus placebo or comparing two different medicines.

The most famous antidepressant of them all, Prozac – now out of patent and known by its generic name, fluoxetine – was one of the least effective but best tolerated, measured by a low drop-out rate in the trials or fewer side-effects reported. The most effective of the drugs was amitriptyline, which was the sixth best tolerated.

Related (long study, well-worth the read):
hxxp://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32802-7/fulltext

Major depressive disorder is one of the most common, burdensome, and costly psychiatric disorders worldwide in adults. Pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments are available; however, because of inadequate resources, antidepressants are used more frequently than psychological interventions. Prescription of these agents should be informed by the best available evidence. Therefore, we aimed to update and expand our previous work to compare and rank antidepressants for the acute treatment of adults with unipolar major depressive disorder.