… gets some high-profile attention.
David Brooks, New York Times:
Anybody who is on antidepressants, or knows somebody who is, should read Marcia Angell’s series “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” from The New York Review of Books. Many of us have been taught that depression arises, in part, from chemical imbalances in the brain. Apparently, there is no evidence to support that.
Many of us thought that antidepressants work. Apparently, there is meager evidence to support that, too. They may work slightly better than placebos, Angell argues, but only under certain circumstances. They may also be permanently altering people’s brains and unintentionally fueling the plague of mental illness by causing episodes of mania, for example. I wouldn’t consider Angell the last word on this, but it’s certainly a viewpoint worth learning about.
The latest study suggests antidepressants work no better than placebos.
UD‘s posts about Angell’s essays are here (scroll down).