Johann Hari

The numbers showed that 25 percent of the effects of antidepressants were due to natural recovery, 50 percent6 were due to the story you had been told about them, and only 25 percent to the actual chemicals.

The vast majority of research into whether drugs work or not is funded by big pharmaceutical companies, and they do this research for a specific reason: they want to be able to market those drugs so they can make a profit out of them.

He learned right away that the drug companies had—for years—been selectively publishing research, and to a greater degree than he expected. For example, in one trial for Prozac, the drug

was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only twenty-seven of them. Those twenty-seven patients9 were the ones the drug seemed to work for.

antidepressants do cause an improvement in the Hamilton score—they do make depressed people feel better. It’s an improvement of 1.8 points.
Irving furrowed his brow. That’s a third less than getting better sleep.

it suggested the drugs were having almost no meaningful effect at all, at least for the average patient—that like John Haygarth’s patients back in Bath, the story made them feel better for a time, but then they would sink back as the real underlying problem reasserted itself.

The side effects of the drugs, by contrast, were very real.

They make many people gain weight, or develop sexual dysfunction, or start to sweat a lot

But when it came to the effects they are intended to have—on depression and anxiety? They are highly unlikely to solve the problem for most people.

Later, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn’t work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small. The journal concluded they shouldn’t be prescribed to teenagers any more.