In his blog Psychology Salon, psychologist Randy Paterson explores what the balance of evidence is showing us after 60 years of increasing medical treatments for depression. Are drug treatments ineffective, or worse than ineffective?
“If the mark of successful medical intervention is that a disorder appears less often, is less prevalent in the population at large, appears later in life than previously, is less severe when it happens, if recurrence is less frequent and recovery is more complete, if the burden on the medical system is lower, if disability is minimized and mortality is reduced, then we consider the intervention a success,” writes Paterson. “Sometimes we achieve gains on a few of these measures but not all of them. In the case of depression, however, the problem has worsened on virtually all fronts.”
The Medicalization of Mood: Worse Than Nothing, or Just Ineffective? (Psychology Salon, December 30, 2014)
