Depression is almost always treated with depression pills, although their effect is so small that it lacks clinical relevance. In most placebo-controlled trials, the effect is measured as an improvement on the Hamilton Depression Scale, and meta-analyses have shown that the effect is considerably less than the smallest effect that can be perceived, even for patients with very severe depression.
The pills are not curative and only have small benefits, if any. In contrast, they have many harms, which are readily felt by the patients. Their main effect is to ruin people’s sex lives. Half of the patients who had a normal sex life before will have it disturbed or made impossible. And yet, in the upside-down world of psychiatry, the pills that destroy your sex life are called happy pills. I call them unhappy pills or anti-sex pills.
A highly relevant question is what the patients think about the pills. Do they feel that their benefits outweigh their harms? Benefits and harms are not measured on the same scale but we can get an idea about this balance if we look at drop-outs in placebo-controlled trials. When patients decide whether to continue in a trial till the end or to drop out, they have, at least indirectly, made a judgment about whether they like taking the pills.
It has been abundantly demonstrated that published depression trials are not reliable. My research group therefore used the 71 clinical study reports we had obtained from drug agencies to study drop-outs. No one but us had ever read the 67,319 pages about these trials (18,426 patients), which amounted to a stack 7m high. We found that 12% more patients dropped out while on drug than while on placebo.
The patients preferred the placebo even though some of them had been harmed by cold turkey withdrawal effects when being randomised to a placebo from a depression drug they were already on. Thus, the drugs are even worse than what we found.
Quality of life is a more direct measure of whether the patients get any benefit from taking the pills. We therefore also looked at quality of life, which we expected would be worse on pills than on placebo. But we had now come too close to the secrets of depression pills. The reporting of quality of life was virtually non-existent. Even in the confidential clinical study reports submitted to regulators, a huge amount of data was missing, and selective reporting of outcomes that happened to be positive was common. Despite this bias, we found only small differences between drug and placebo.
Our two meta-analyses lead to the conclusion that that depression pills worsen quality of life.
I collaborated with a politician in the Danish Parliament and via her, the Minister of Health was asked on 26 September 2017 (question 1063): “Will the minister explain whether it is a serious conclusion when the Danish Drug Agency emphasises that in some of the studies an effect on quality of life has been found, when only three out of 131 studies have published data on quality of life?”
The Minister replied that the Agency had pointed out that there was an effect on quality of life in the studies where this was measured and that this supported the clinical relevance of the pills.
The Danish Drug Agency was ultra-comical and behaved like the drug industry’s useful idiots. Quality of life was measured in many more studies than three. We included 15 trials in our review! What has been published are data that happened to be positive by chance or after they had been tortured till they confessed.
And the amusement continued. The Minister said that, “Concluding on clinical relevance as such requires nuanced considerations and the involvement of professional expertise. A number on a scale (such as Hamilton’s depression scale, ed.) is not sufficient.”
Curiously, “professional expertise” never involves asking the patients what they think. But this has been done in some placebo-controlled trials. In contrast to the psychiatrists, the patients, both children and adults (page 56), say that the pills don’t work.
In my view, depression pills should not be used by anyone, also because they double the risk of suicide, both in children and adults, and they make it more difficult for people to return to a normal life. The rate of disability pensions follows the usage rates for depression pills closely, and that after SSRIs came on the market, a 35-fold increase in disabled mentally ill children in the USA was seen in just 20 years.
I can’t write properly at the moment, but I’ll tell you what would improve the quality of everyone’s life: knowing this. Mother Nature expressed herself in prokaryotic form, and then in plant form. Notice how plants ARE the sun. Their very energy, their very life energy, is that of the Sun. She drinks the sun in plant form. But she couldn’t reach back to the sun, and the whole urge of nature is to recapture and re-join the sun. No-wonder she made eyes in the herbivore who ate vast amounts of plant matter, concentrating all that life energy into a more powerful being, this time with a brain and movement, capable of harvesting much more power. And this was a vast sacrifice of Mother Earth out of love for the sun, because despite our beliefs, the life in a plant is even more pure, beautiful, and therefore valuable then that in a herbivore and even more that of a carnivore. But these latter have more power, and then the second sacrifice was creating the carnivore who could again concentrate all the life energy in the herbivore and vicariously the plants, and the greatest possible sacrifice was made to produce the human beings who are the end result of this process, the species finally able to reach the sun. She let herself be shattered into a billion pieces for this result, and this is her passion and love for the father, for which she sacrifices everything in order to reach this sun. So what does reaching the sun mean? On the physical level, it would make sense that we retrace the journey of all Earth life and go from carnivore to herbivore to feasting on the sun, but that’s mere speculation. But there is a more obvious unity with the sun. It’s knowing who we actually are. It is becoming the whole Universe, which I am. Which is the truth that we are the whole of life, including every animal, plant, and the sky and the sun, and this understanding comes about through understanding ourselves, because ourselves are the whole of life and the Universe which is the real self of all selves. This just isn’t a theory. It’s a perception and a very obvious fact to the most basic forms of life and nature. Somehow it’s instinctive to know this. But it’s intellectual to forget this. But this is the actual truth people. We are that. I know it’s too incredible and wonderful to believe but the truth is more incredible and wonderful still, and it is beyond all words and beliefs. I’m not someone who lives in theories. And if you know it you will read the sky as the joint mind of the Father and the Mother. I was watching the sky today and saw only in it the communication between them as the sun as it hit the clouds of the Earth, and the sun as it hit all the leaves and the gras and the rabbits. And although I’ve seen it a million times all I understood was this communication between the Earth and sky, and when you hear this there is no self, just love, bliss, explosive wonder and love. It is actually the truth of who we are. You have to die to know this. Love is when the self is not. And where the self is, love is not. If you love it is just that, which is the whole Universe inside me, even though I am nothing at all besides it. We are the father and the Universe is the unreachable mystery, the untouchable Mother, our body, our Earth. Light, which is the source of light and the seer of the light, is the passion we call life running between the father and the mother. Also, every psychotic experience is true. There is no way I can explain this but I saw it in a flash. The way to read a psychotic experience is take them as literally and naively on face value as any child, and then see that consciousness is the whole consciousness of life, and the whole of life or any part can erupt through at any moment. And if you think you are being persecuted by everyone around you this is exactly right. When we are spiritually unwell we send out a signal and the spiritual atmosphere tries to attack us and finish us off, just like a cell in the body sends out a chemical message when it is sick so that immune factors destroy it. The same even happens with human beings but if I say anymore I’ll never finish this comment. Have a nice day.
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Thanks No-one. I really enjoyed your short narrative of the creation of our world.
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Dr. Gotzsche – thank you for an excellent article. And thank you for pointing out the truth – in most cases, taking antidepressants does NOT improve a person’s quality of life (and in many more cases, actively worsens the person’s quality of life.)
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I’ll tell you what improves your quality of life – forming a punk band with two people who also can’t play and sounding like a bunch of drunk people throwing dustbins at each other. And the record company will say when you bring in your fist demo, as they did say on a Kitkat advert for British TV, “You all stink. You can’t play. You dress like absolute rubbish. I think you’ll go far!”
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“Do Depression Pills Improve Quality of Life?”
Not in my humble opinion, but they do create the symptoms of “bipolar,” (even when one was fraudulently given a SNRI, under the false claim, it is a “safe smoking cessation med.”) But such a “bipolar” misdiagnosis does result in one being inappropriately put on the “antipsychotics.”
But since the psychological and psychiatric industries have been arrogantly lying and denying knowledge of the adverse and common withdrawal symptoms of the psych neurotoxins, for decades. For example (wow! the censorship is staggering, this is seemingly now the best link I can give):
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/brain-shivers-from-chat-room-to-clinic/642FBBAE131EAB792E474F02A4B2CCC0
And the, mostly non-medically trained, scientific fraud based, DSM deluded, “mental health” industries are still denying the reality that the antidepressants / antipsychotics / neuroleptics / anticholinergic drugs can create both the positive and negative symptoms of “schizophrenia, via anticholinergic toxidrome and neuroleptic induced deficit disorder”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroleptic-induced_deficit_syndrome
I truly believe we have a societal problem, in regards to the entirety, of the so called “mental health industries.” Who apparently can’t comprehend, that those who’ve been unjustly given the power to FUBAR innocent others, for profit, will also likely be judged fairly by God, like all others.
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Thank you Professor Gotzsche.
If anyone was afforded Fair. Full and Informed Consent re the quality of life-destroying Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) of depression pills, including AKATHISIA and its misdiagnosis as ‘pseudo-bipolar disorder’ – ‘psychotic depression’ and other none existent ‘Serious Mental Illness’ – – As well as being warned re their anti-libidinous ADRs, plus the risk of violence against self and/or others: Would they really choose to take this class of drugs?
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okay so what I’m going to say might not make much sense or be completely inaccurate,, i don’t know im pretty young but i see alot of MIA articles in my Google Feed and read them often
but it got me thinking, whenever i see coverage of antidepressants the main side effects seems to be low sex drive and it ruining relationships or sex life, is there a possibility that this is intentionally done to depressed people because people see depression as genetic and a lower sex drive leads to less reproduction in that population?
i might be wrong or thinking too oddly about it, im just a highschool drop out so i don’t know much, but it’s the first thing comes to mind when i read these articles… again this might be completely wrong speculation but it’s just the first thing that came to mind
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Dr Gotzsche,
Antidepressants lower Folic Acid and Folic Acid deficiency impairs nitric oxide metabolism and contributes to endothelial dysfunction and, in turn, vascular erectyle dysfunction.
For example, H.Pylori (which also lowers Folic Acid) is also a risk factor for ED.
Plus, many people who are depressed have MTHFR mutations so they may already have low Folic Acid and anti d’s make it worse.
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Thank you for mentioning the MTHFR mutations / variants that result in lower methylation of folate which is otherwise needed for folate to cross the Blood Brain Barrier and contribute to processes essential to good health of multiple organ systems and mental health. I would love to read more description of how methylated folate accomplishes these feats. I would also expect to find something about the contribution of magnesium as a co-factor to these essential processes. I use methylated folate to improve my mental clarity and energy. Very late in life I recognized in the medical literature the descriptions of my own life-long health characteristics that are associated with deficient folate or reduced methylation of folate.
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