Reddit reviews The Anti-Depressant Fact Book: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Luvox

> Has anyone looked into the antidepressant vs placebo debate ?

I did look into it, but not in as much detail as I would like. I didn't study medicine or psychology, I studied engineering and started studying either books or scientific articles or reading whatever I found on the internet about psychiatry because the treatments I did were pretty crappy.

Of what I read about this specific debate of antidepressant vs placebo, there is the article you mentioned that is on the side that antidepressants work better than placebo. [This blog] (https://fugitivepsychiatrist.com/) by a psychiatrist is of the opinion that they work better than a placebo too, but I don't remember where exactly in the blog he makes his argument. If you search for "placebo" inside it, you find a bunch of his articles, some of them will be the ones that deal with this debate. The author of this blog is one of the moderators of the subreddit /r/PsychMelee/ , he is user u/fugitivepsychiatrist

There is this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0977307506/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=america+fooled&qid=1571429094&sr=8-1 that I read it all, and half of it is about the whole antidepressant VS placebo debate, and how big farma's influence pushed bad science as good science. According to him, antidepressants simply do not work better than a placebo, trials show this, and the trials that supposedly prove that they work better than a placebo are just bad trials with methodological errors. For instance, one error in those trials is that in some of them, the patient taking the antidepressant was also taking another drug to counteract the agitating effect of the antidepressant. If you search for "timothy scott antidepressant" on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=timothy+scott+antidepressant , you will find some videos on which the author talks about his views. There was a site where you could get one of the chapters of his book for free, I remember it being www.americafooled.com or the same site .org, but it's not on those addresses, and can't find it anymore.

There's also this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465022006/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=the+emperor%27s+new+drugs&qid=1571430255&sr=8-1 , which I only read a little of it, it's entirely about this antidepressant vs placebo debate, and the author I think also proposes that antidepressants are no better than a placebo in the book. If you search for the author on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=irving+kirsch, you find some videos where he explains his findings.

There is also the psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who is pretty critical of all psychiatric drugs, he was involved as an expert witness in an lawsuit against Ely lilly when they were sued because a patient taking prozac killed a bunch of people with a gun and committed suicide, and he writes about what he found out researching the drug company papers when he was involved in the trial. He writes that the trials the company did to get the approval of the antidepressant had problems (he mentions the same problem I mentioned, that patients given antidepressant were also given another drug), but I don't remember in which of his books he writes about this, it was either one or more than one of these 3 books of his that has this information: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0738210986/ref=sr_1_3?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-3 ; https://www.amazon.com/dp/073820451X/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-7 ; https://www.amazon.com/dp/082612934X/ref=sr_1_8?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-8 .

I've also come across a page from the FDA on the internet saying that the trials to approve the antidepressants really show that they work better than a placebo, but I don't remember what the link to that page was.

So that is what I came across. But as I didn't read each of the individual trials that supposedly show that antidepressants either work better or don't work better than a placebo, I don't know who is right. I just know what the people who read those trials and/or read studies of people who read those trials has to say. I'm actually curious to study more of this subject to find out who is right in this debate, but I ended up not studying this any further due to a bunch of factors.