Antidepressants - the limited analysis of a polarized argument

The current President John Oldham and President-elect Jeffrey Lieberman of the American Psychiatric Association came out with this press release today on a 60 Minutes episode characterizing antidepressants as no better than placebo.  They describe this characterization as “irresponsible and dangerous reporting” and “a message that could potentially cause suffering and harm to patients with mood disorders.”

It is good to see the APA finally taking a stand on this issue.  Antidepressants and the psychiatrists who prescribe them have been taking a pounding in the popular press for years.  The main proponent here was also featured in a Newsweek headline story two years ago.  This is a prototypical example of how the media and special interest groups can distort science and facts and politicize the discussion that must be nuanced.  The problem is that you have to know something and be fairly free of bias to participate in a nuanced discussion.  Like most issues pertaining to psychiatry, the issue is always polarized and poorly discussed in the media.

I got involved in this issue as a managing editor of an Internet journal and I solicited a paper from a world renowned epidemiologist to get his current view on antidepressant meta-analyses. In order to present the entire argument I also solicited response from a world renowned psychopharmacologist with broad expertise in this field. Both articles are available online for free and I think if they are both read in total they represent the most accurate picture of antidepressant response.  Both references are listed at the bottom of this page.

Rather than get into the specific details at this point I will say that it was extremely difficult to find a anyone willing to provide a rebuttal to the to the original article by Ioannidis, but anyone who reads that paper by Davis, et al and who follows the antidepressant literature will have a greater appreciation of the effectiveness of these medications.  I hope to post some information on the statistical analysis as well.  At some level people tend to view statistics as a hard mathematical science and there is plenty of room for interpretation.  The use of meta-analysis is a common approach to these problems and a detailed look at the shortcomings of meta-analysis are seldom discussed.  That might explain why one meta-analysis shows minimal effects and another shows that there might be some antidepressants with unique effectiveness (see Cipriani, et al)

A final dimension that is critical in the analysis of any source is potential conflicts of interest.  The only conflict of interest that is typically discussed is the financial interests of authors and pharmaceutical companies in producing positive trials.  That ignores the fact that many of these trials have been very public failures and that post trial surveillance limits the use of some of these compounds.  There are other conflicts of interest to consider when an author is selling a viewpoint and can potentially profit from it – either financially or politically.

The APA could provide a valuable service here in making the documents from the FDA and the EMA widely available for public discussion and analysis.

George Dawson, MD

 “60 Minutes” Segment on Antidepressants "Irresponsible and Dangerous" – APA New release Febrary 22, 2012.

Ioannidis JP. Effectiveness of antidepressants: an evidence myth constructed

from a thousand randomized trials? Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2008 May 27;3:14.

Davis JM, Giakas WJ, Qu J, Prasad P, Leucht S. Should we treat depression with drugs or psychological interventions? A reply to Ioannidis. Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2011 May 10;6:8.

Cipriani A, Furukawa TA, Salanti G, Geddes JR, et al.  Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 12 new-generation antidepressants: a multiple-treatments meta-analysis.  The Lancet - 28 February 2009 ( Vol. 373, Issue 9665, Pages 746-758 )