Antidepressants Work, and Depression Severity Does Not Matter

Suggestions that antidepressants work only in severely depressed patients have been based largely on analyses comparing different study outcomes — i.e., fewer overall study effects were found in studies that had, on average, less-depressed patients — and on the existence of many unpublished studies that did not show antidepressant efficacy, suggesting that published studies overestimated efficacy. Only one small analysis (JW Psychiatry Feb 1 2010) of six already published and highly selected studies used individual patient-level data (N=718) to examine the issue of less effect in less-depressed patients.

These researchers obtained longitudinal, patient-specific data from all sponsored, published and unpublished, placebo-controlled studies on…