According to a new study, antidepressants are not actually that efficient at making people feel happier!
The analysis was able to find that patients taking such drugs did not experience a significantly better quality of life when compared to other depressed patients that were not taking the pills.
The large scale and longtime study included no less than 17.5 million US adults dealing with depression over a whole decade, half of them being medicated while the other half were not.
The researchers determined that during those 10 years there was a slight improvement in both groups, no matter if they had been taking antidepressants or not.
The King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, researchers called for some more long term studies on people taking antidepressants in order to more accurately determine the real impact they have on patients’ quality of life.
In fact, NHS doctors have been moving away from prescribing antidepressants since they are not only seemingly mostly inefficient but they also cause a number of terrible side effects.
Instead, the health service advises that patients suffering from mild depression should be offered group therapy sessions instead of medication.
At the same time, some independent experts stress that there can’t be any strong conclusions drawn from the study since those given the antidepressants were generally more depressed at the start which means the comparison between the two groups is not really fair.
They also pointed out that other clinical studies have clearly shown that antidepressants are, in fact, capable of really improving people’s quality of life.
For instance, a psychiatrist at University College London by the name of Dr. Gemma Lewis, stated that “In this study, the people who received antidepressants had a worse quality of life, and they are likely to have been more severely depressed, than those who didn’t. This type of bias is difficult to eradicate in a naturalistic study like this, which doesn’t involve an experimental design. Clinical trials with experimental designs have found that antidepressants improve mental health related quality of life.”
Furthermore, Professor Eduard Vieta from the University of Barcelona also shared that “The major limitation of this paper is that, as is often the case with these kinds of studies, the confounder by indication. The inability to control for severity of depression between the two different groups is a crucial flaw and therefore there is little we can learn from this data.”
