Do Antidepressants Make You Sad?

In the pendulum-swinging debate over the effectiveness of antidepressants, the latest findings by some researchers will not be good news for users and supporters of the ubiquitous meds: Used over the long term, antidepressants may “do more harm than good,” and once discontinued are more likely to cause a relapse in the patient—more so than with a patient taking a placebo.

“There are data now that suggest that the longer the period of administration, the more likely the patient will relapse,” says Dr. Giovanni Fava, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has been looking at this possibility for nearly 20 years. His latest article, currently in press, is to be published in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

And Dr. Irving Kirsch, a professor of psychology at the University of Hull, in the U.K., and the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth who spent 15 years examining sheaths of data—much of it unpublished—from clinical trials of antidepressants, has concluded that antidepressants are, in essence, hardly better at alleviating depression than placebos; in fact, he argues that the widely accepted belief that depression is, at bottom, a chemical imbalance, is a misconception.