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More than one in 10 Americans take an antidepressant, and that number jumps to
one in four among women aged 50 to 64.1 They’re the most commonly prescribed class of medication other than antibiotics,2 but despite their overwhelming popularity there’s an important question that needs to be answered: do they work?

Overwhelming evidence shows that antidepressants do not work as advertised. In fact, at best, antidepressants are comparable to placebos, and at worst they can cause devastating side effects, including suicidal and homicidal tendencies, and deterioration into even
more serious mental illness.

A Closer Look at Antidepressant Research

A study in the January 2010 issue of
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that there is little evidence that SSRIs (a popular group of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and others) have any benefit to people with mild to moderate depression (the group to which they’re most often prescribed), and they work no better than a placebo.3 Those researchers concluded:

“The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”

A meta-analysis published in PLoS Medicine also concluded that the difference between antidepressants and placebo pills is very small-and that both are ineffective for most depressed patients.4 Only the most severely depressed showed any response to antidepressants at all, and that response was quite minimal.

Research by Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Hull in the UK, and colleagues presented another interesting theory — that the side effects produced by antidepressants are the reason why they are sometimes perceived to work better.