$%^& anti-depressants $%^&

British Psychiatrists Debate: "Clinical trials of antidepressant medications are producing meaningless results"

Wed, 27 Aug 2003

"The fact that most people support the psychopharmacological orthodoxy is, in itself, no argument and it is important to examine the evidence before drawing conclusions."

The psychiatric establishment is on trial--its foundation and claimed scientific basis and method--at least for the treatment of depression--has been smashed by an examination of previously concealed evidence from FDA approved controlled clinical trials.

The data submitted to the FDA proves the opposite of what is / has been claimed by the drug industry and its stakeholders: institutional psychiatry, the professional journals, the popular media whose dependency on drug advertising compromises its science reports, and patient "advocacy" groups that serve as cheering squads for those who feed them empty promises "hope."

Psychiatry is hard put to refute the hard evidence demonstrating that rather than being an effective treatment for depression, antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and the rest of the SSRI group, were worthless--or no better than placebo. These findings have been corroborated by several independent analyses.

Adding fuel to the brewing scandal of institutionalized deception, are the revelations in the UK media that children prescribed Paxil (Seroxat) were at 2 to 3 times the risk of a suicide action than those on placebo. The UK government ban on the drug for children and the current re-evaluation of the data from all SSRIs by the UK and the FDA, threatens to unravel a multi-billion dollar business that has thrived on the basis of false claims.

While American psychiatry remains silent--lest any utterance might tend to incriminate the profession further, a published debate (of sorts) appears in the current British Journal of Psychiatry: "Clinical trials of antidepressant medications are producing meaningless results." (excerpt below)

The introduction to the debate states: "Kirsch et al (2002) use the analogy of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' to describe the findings from their meta-analysis of randomised placebo-controlled trials of antidepressants. They conclude that antidepressant medication appears to have only a small effect on outcome over and above placebo. In this analogy psychiatry is the emperor, drug trials are the fraudsters and the deception is being revealed by a growing body of critical opinion proposing that, once methodological problems with clinical trials are taken into account, antidepressants either do not work at all or have an effect that is so small as to be clinically unimportant."

The news is that BOTH sides in the debate CONCEDE the fact that clinical trials as currently constituted are rigged, that screening of subjects results in unrepresentative groups of patients, that reporting of findings are biased and therefore invalid, and serve no value for clinicians.

Not addressed in the debate is the obvious: Since placebo does not pose risks, or severe adverse effects that some patients taking an SSRI experienced, the risk / benefit ratio is clearly on the side of placebo. If you also consider that placebo is free, whereas SSRIs involve substantial cost to individuals, insurance companies and taxpayers, the choice is a no brainer.

However, the following statement by British psychiatrists acknowledges psychiatry's tenuous scientific basis: psychiatry needs drugs to "buttress" (legitimize) its claim to be a medical profession:

"There is enormous investment in our belief that antidepressants work, from its buttressing the scientific basis of psychiatry, through our need as clinicians to have the tools for alleviating distress, to providing a financial return for pharmaceutical companies. However, as we psychiatrists know only too well, firmly held beliefs may, on occasion, be delusional."

If psychiatry's firmly held belief in drugs is delusional, what, one wonders is the FDA's rationale for endorsing, clinically worthless placebo-controlled clinical trials? Clearly such trials do not measure up to what agency officials refer to as "the Gold Standard."

The only effect antidepressants have is side effects. Sugar pills do a much better job treating depression and have no dangerous side effects.

Get off those meds ASAP!