Anti-depressants are NOT a scam

There are some big things wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. They should, for instance, be required to show that a new more expensive drug is better in some way than an existing generic before any insurance agrees to pay for it. They should be barred from giving incentives to physicians to prescribe a given drug. They should be barred from paying for physicians to go to conferences, etc. They should be barred from advertising drugs to the public.

How people explain things is important, and I have mixed feelings about it. MRI "magnetic resonance imagining" used to be called NMR "nuclear magnetic resonance", but it was changed because that word "nuclear" scared people. I take that to be a sound call. I've heard there is a move afoot to relabel some conditions to take the word "cancer" out of it, when the tumor is slow enough growing that a person is better to leave it alone -- that word "cancer" makes people think they need to fix it. I think I'd support that. So I'm not terribly worried about doctors not giving the very best description of how SSRIs work.

What is not in doubt is that in high-quality, large, double-blind trials, antidepressants make a lot of people feel better. The article can cavalierly say that prozac was not more effective than tricyclics, except it had lower side effects in some people. Well, that is a huge difference, whether a drug has side effects that make it very unpleasant or ones that make it manageable.

Maybe they are overprescribed. I know a doctor's perspective is often that they don't like telling the patient there's nothing they can do to help them, so they find something to try. Not great but not a conspiracy.