Antidepressant drugs may helpful for depressed people, reveals study

Antidepressants drugs exert a specific antidepressant effect and it is effective for depressed people, according to the recent study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The new research has denied all the claims that the antidepressants do not work. 

In earlier research, it was asserted that the antidepressant drugs such as SSRIs that depressed patients are taking to improve themselves, in reality, they are not exerting any actual anti-depressant effect. The research revealed that the fact that many people who consuming anti-depressants regard themselves as improved may be possible because of the placebo effect.

Placebo Effect?

Under this effect, a person who expects to be improved by a medication often also feels improved, even if the medicine lacks actual effect.

The researchers have conducted a study on 3,344 patients, revealed that the drugs which they studied are superior to placebo with respect to antidepressant efficacy.

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The theory that antidepressants outperform placebo merely by means of side effects making of side effects making he patients realizing that he or she has not been given a placebo, and thereby enhancing the expectancy of improvement, may hence be rejected.

However, if SSRIs had indeed acted merely by means of a placebo effect, these drugs should not outperform actual placebo in clinical trials where patients have been treated with a SSRI or with ineffective placebo pills, and where neither the physician nor the patient knows which treatment the patient has been given until the study is over.

To explain why antidepressants in such trials nevertheless often cause greater symptom relief than placebo, it has been suggested that SSRI-induced side effects will make the patient understand that he or she has not been given a placebo, hence enhancing his or her belief of having been given an effective treatment.

In the end, researchers strongly support the assumption that SSRIs exert a specific antidepressant effect. They also said that frequent questions on these drugs in media is totally unjustified and it will keep away depressed people from effective treatment.

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