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by Alex3917 2818 days ago
> all antidepressants were more effective than placebo

Comparing them to placebo isn't appropriate, you need to compare them with an active placebo and only look at studies that continue longer than two years. Of which there are all of like 2 studies.
1 comments
thomasfedb 2817 days ago
You should remember that we do research on real humans. Sometime this means we can't have the evidence we'd like to have.

Active placebos are designed to cause detriment to the patient - to cause side effects to convince them they're not on the placebo. Getting ethics approval to do randomised trials in depressed patients is hard enough without harming your control group.

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Alex3917 2816 days ago
> Active placebos are designed to cause detriment to the patient

Patients on active placebos have reduced depression symptoms as compared with patients on non-active placebos.

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