[brookside]

"We excluded trials that included 20% or more of participants with bipolar disorder, psychotic depression, or treatment-resistant depression"

This is an honest question - is it fair to exclude people for whom antidepressants don't work in an analysis of if antidepressants work?

[chas]

If “placebo-resistant depression” and “treatment-resistant depression” were synonyms, we would expect that excluding treatment-resistant depression from your study would result in the studying showing precisely no difference between treatment and placebo. The fact that the meta-analysis shows any difference at all suggests that “treatment-resistant depression” might be a meaningful category.