Yes! says the BBC, reporting on the results of a new trial -
Drugs 'can help mild depression'
Not so fast. Read this before you reach for the Prozac.
It was about this time last year that Irving Kirsch and colleagues released Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits. This bombshell of a meta-analysis concluded, notoriously, that the benefits of antidepressants over and above placebo are in general pretty small. Moreover, it claimed that the benefits are even smaller - indeed pretty much zero - in people whose depression is not very severe to begin with.
However, Neuroskeptic readers will know that antidepressant trials are not all they're cracked up to be (1,2). On top of which Kirsch et al. were a little "creative" with their statistics, as bloggers P J Leonard and Robert Waldmann aptly demonstrated. So, the claim that antidepressants don't work in mild depression rests on shaky foundations.
But ...
