Until recently, few pharmaceutical companies pre-registered antidepressant trials, which allowed them to selectively publish. This means that antidepressants may be nowhere near as effective as commonly believed, and so doctors are overweighting the benefits compared to the costs of side effects. .
“While only half of these trials had formally significant effectiveness, published reports almost ubiquitously claimed significant results. "Negative" trials were either left unpublished or were distorted to present "positive" results.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2412901/
If this is true, then many people who currently take antidepressants may actually be better, not worse, without them, since at least they’d avoid the side effects.
Further, the “chemical imbalance” theory that is propagated through paid advertising has no applicability to a doctor prescribing an antidepressant, since the doctor has no way of measuring and monitoring that imbalance should one exist.
“While only half of these trials had formally significant effectiveness, published reports almost ubiquitously claimed significant results. "Negative" trials were either left unpublished or were distorted to present "positive" results.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2412901/
If this is true, then many people who currently take antidepressants may actually be better, not worse, without them, since at least they’d avoid the side effects.
Further, the “chemical imbalance” theory that is propagated through paid advertising has no applicability to a doctor prescribing an antidepressant, since the doctor has no way of measuring and monitoring that imbalance should one exist.