A psychotherapist says depression can be debilitating — but that it’s also been largely created by doctors and drug companies as a medical condition. Is depression manufactured? Two decades after the introduction of antidepressants, it’s become commonplace to assume that our sadness can be explained in terms of a disease called depression.
What if antidepressants were not just too easily available and overly prescribed by doctors—as has been argued in many venues for years now, though to no discernible effect—but didn’t even work? That’s the takeaway premise of psychology professor Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., in his new book, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth.
Women who take certain antidepressant drugs while pregnant may double their child’s risk of being born with a certain variety of heart defect, according to a study conducted by researchers from Aarhaus University in Denmark and published in the medical journal BMJ.
With drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) now stating it will abandon future antidepressant research, one can only wonder if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration noted GSK’s CEO Andrew Witty’s admission that it is “hard to prove that a depression drug is working” because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys, and not by the clear-cut blood tests and biological measures used in other diseases.”
GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs, a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.