Antidepressants

Scientific American explores a crowdfunded approach to researching methamphetamine addiction, suggesting the approach is adaptable to pursuing other questions that are challenged to find...

David Healy "likened psychiatry’s attitude toward its faltering legitimacy to the Vatican’s widely derided response to its child sex abuse scandal by priests —...

In June last year, three months into a prescription for anti-depressant drug Efexor, former financial analyst Tim Hillier left his hotel to wander the empty streets of Alice Springs in an attempt to clear his head. An hour earlier, he had wagered $80,000 -- almost the entirety of his life-savings -- on a first-round Wimbledon tennis match featuring Aussie hope Sam Stosur.

A meta-analysis of studies of 168,435 adults who were free of diabetes at baseline found that those who used antidepressant medication were 68% more...

The state of Ohio plans to invest $1 million in the next three years to review the use of psychiatric drugs prescribed to children,...

Ben Goldacre reflects on his having been mislead as a psychiatrist in his forthcoming book Bad Pharma (excerpted here in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian), and...

Following a fourfold-increase in antidepressant use in Scotland over the last two decades, one in seven Scots are taking the drugs.  Prescriptions for antipsychotics...

Saying that she had been "jacked up" on a new medication (Zoloft) and had not slept for five or six days, a Milwaukee man...

Pfizer will face a class action lawsuit by investors who claim that the drugmaker's Wyeth unit failed to disclose information about its antidepressant Pristiq's...

An Op-Ed in Op-Ed News discusses the disconnect between concern about rising suicide rates in the general population (and the military) and awareness of...

1 Boring Old Man reflects on his work with children and adolescents, in which he directly observes the troubling effects of antidepressants, and the...

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine asks whether settlements such as the $3 billion GlaxoSmithKline agreed to last July regarding off-label...

Researchers from the Taiwan and the United States find through a study of 5,183 subjects with motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) and 31,093 matched controls...

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

With drugs for ADHD increasing 17%, and an "unprecedented increase in patients taking antidepressants and antipsychotics," overall prescription drug sales in the United States...

Neuroleptic Drugs and Violence by Catherine Clarke SRN, SCM, MSSCH, MBChA. and Jan Evans MCSP. Grad Dip Phys.

1 Boring Old Man bores ever more deeply into the newly available raw data from GlaxoSmithKline's study of Paxil in children, finding that "if...

An international team of researchers (including Irving Kirsch) found in a review "of 62 pivotal antidepressant trials consisting of data from 13,802 depressed patients"...

Researchers from Tufts and Harvard find in a review of 233 medical charts of psychiatrically hospitalized youth at three points in time (1991, 1998...

For the past several years whenever a critical essay has come along examining the work of Irving Kirsch and his colleagues I have made an effort to examine the validity of the proposed arguments. Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the unpublished trials of antidepressants and then pooled the clinical trial data – both published and unpublished ─ and analyzed it as a single data set. It is common for pharmaceutical companies to only publish those studies that find their products effective, and to withhold the negative studies, making it difficult to reach accurate conclusions by examining only the published data. Kirsch and his colleagues have reported that in the company sponsored clinical trials, the SSRIs only marginally outperform placebo, with the difference being statistically different but not clinically significant.

Time magazine reviews the evidence on exercise for depression, finding that exercise alters brain chemistry such that the brain shows less stress in response...

Almost 50 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in the U.K. in 2011, a rise of 9% over 2010. The increase is attributed, at...

Consumer Reports recommends against antipsychotic "augmentation therapy" for depression. The consumer watchdog magazine finds that the unproven efficacy, harmful side effects, availability of alternatives,...

Zoloft isn't just for depression any more; it also kills fungal meningitis. Researchers from Texas A&M find that "The problem for many current antifungal...