Not a fan of big pharma and the FDA but I've had depression for 30+ years and sometimes antidepressants work for a while and I welcome those periods of respite.
The paper's key point isn't new, we don't understand the biochemistry of depression
What's new is how easily it serves the right-wing agenda
A few other key points about the study and its author Joanna Moncrieff from the Rolling Stone article
Moncrieff’s work is frequently promoted by an organization called Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), which touts itself as a “mental health industry watchdog” and was established by the Church of Scientology, which is virulently opposed to psychiatry and medical interventions for mental illness.
It describes mental illness as a diagnostic category as an effort on behalf of the state to exert mind control tactics over individuals who refuse to conform to societal standards, referring to psychiatry as “the arena in which the conflict between freedom and health comes most sharply into focus.”
In the past, she [Montcrieff] has also compared Covid vaccine mandates to forced psychiatric care. “Forced treatment in psychiatry is rightly controversial and limited, but now we are forcing thousands to have Covid jab,” she tweeted last December.
To read Moncrieff’s paper and conclude that antidepressants do not work, as many on the right have, is the wrong message to take away from the study. “[The paper] doesn’t undermine the efficacy of antidepressants for those people for whom they work,” says [medical psychologist Joseph] Comaty.
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