Serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)

Professor James Potash discusses recent findings that question the effectiveness of serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

Studies of antidepressant medications have been going on for 50 years and in general the antidepressant medications seem to work about sixty percent of the time. Now, a placebo typically works thirty percent of the time, so generally the antidepressants help. There have been some meta-analyses of recent data that show that that gap between antidepressant effect and placebo effect is smaller than some of the older studies have showed. Some of the meta-analyses have shown that the statistically significant difference between medication and placebo only applies to cases where depression is more severe. That seems to me to be a reasonable conclusion because certainly cases of milder depression do sometimes resolve on their own and sometimes they resolve with psychotherapy, and placebo to a certain extent constitutes a form of psychotherapy.