Tag Archives: antidepressants

The New Yorker — “Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science?”

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression.

Manufacturing Depression—Are Docs Over Prescribing Antidepressants to a Tune of $10 Billion a Year for Drug Companies?

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.

The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth—Debunking the Chemical Imbalance Theory & Drug Efficacy

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.

Taking Antidepressants During Pregnancy Doubles Heart Defect Risk of Newborns

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.

Wake Up FDA—Even Drug Giants Are Admitting No Lab Tests Exist To Prove If Antidepressants Work

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.”