Name: Do Antidepressants Cure Depression? Are Psych Drugs Safe? Dr. Colin Ross & Corrina Psychetruth
Uploaded: 2014-01-16T16:09:38.000Z
Duration: 17 min 22 s
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I'm Psychetruth correspondent, Corrina Rachel and I'm joined today by doctor

An author and practicing psychiatrist in Dallas, TX.

Thank you so much for joining me today.  Well thank you for having me.

So today I wanna ask a burning question, do anti-depressants

For somebody who is experiencing depression, what would you want them to

know about anti-depressants before they started them.

Well that's an excellent and an important question

and the scientific facts are very different

from what you often hear from your doctor

and from what's generally known in the culture.

We're taught, we psychiatrist that anti- depressants are powerful and effective

and that it's really a life-saving intervention

and that you're not doing your job as apsychiatrist

if you don't offer a depressed person a medication.

That's the basic teaching and on the side we're taught that

depression is probably some kind of brain disease

and that's just kind of accepted in our culture.

That the doctors and scientists know that it's a low serotonin problem.

It doesn't have that much to do with your personality or what you've been through in life.

It's just like taking an antibiotic. It's gonna work,

not 100%, but a big percentage of the time.

In fact that whole picture is completely disproven by the existing science.

So you wouldn't recommend then that somebody start?

Well the question's a little bit more complicated

because your in the world of practical reality.

So for instance when I worked in an anxiety disorders clinic in Canada,

it was mostly people with panic attacks coming in. So I'd do an assessment

and thet wo options we have here are we have certain medications

which has got a whole evidence-based showing that it works for panic attacks,

One person would go "I'm not crazy. I don't need medication."

Then the next person would say there's nothing wrong with me I don't need therapy,

I'll take the medication. So people would  have completely opposite viewpoints

some people are just not going to do therapy.

They're not interested, there's no way or they can afford it

or they don't havetime...there's a million different reasons.

So if the person is not going to do any kind of therapy, it's either nothing or medication.

In an ideal situation when you've got time, when you've got insurance

or you could afford to pay for therapy, I'd say the number one way to go is therapy

and there is actually data supporting that. That long-term if you're depressed

and you take antidepressants you're gonna do better with cognitive therapy

it looks like of course just to take a prescription is cheaper

than seeing a therapist week after week after week, but once you get out to about nine months

the cognitive therapy is usually ten or twenty sessions for depression

but the antidepressant you keep taking taking taking taking.

Around about nine months the cost of the antidepressant catches up with

the cost of therapy and then it keeps getting greater and greater and greater.

So from an insurance company point of view

When we look at the evidence on how well do these medications work... So we've got

the old antidepressants and the new anti-depressants and the main group of

which is selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, so they're called SSRIs.

that's prozac, zoloft, and things like that.

When you look at all the studies that are  done by the drug companies including the

ones they've suppressed and not published, when you get those all

there's virtually no difference between drug and placebo.

People with depression, on average their depression scores dropped the same amount.

and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference yourself

if you were on placebo and you were on antidepressant and you had the average drop in depression score

for placebo there's no way you could internally subjectively tell the difference.

No because there's another group in the research,

which is called the waiting list control.

That's where youd on't get drug or placebo or anything and you just wait

until we call you in a few months when a slot opens up. Now those people do worse

So both drug and placebo are  clearly better than doing nothing.

but the drug doesn't work better than the placebo.

Those are the scientific facts, but the way things are set up right now

you can't go to a doctor and tell the doctor i'd like to get a placebo please

because nobody ever asks that question plus the doctors have all these ethical problems

about how it's deceptive to give somebody a placebo without telling them,

And if they did and the person found out they could probably sue them.

There is actually research where people are told well what we're going to do is give you a placebo,

the dummy pill, a sugar pill that has nothing and but we found that

this is quite helpful and that the placebo response stays the same.

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