Antidepressants Work for Major Depression! Not so Fast...

A recent article in Medscape states:
>The latest attempt to trick ourselves into believing that the past few decades of prescribing antidepressants has been an effective strategy comes from one of the most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet. The published meta-analysis' basic finding—since repeated all over the press—is that antidepressants work because they are all better than placebo. What they don't tell you is that they are hardly any better than placebo, and that the only drugs with clinically meaningful benefits are the ones that are used rarely today, the older tricyclic agents.<
>The effect sizes seen are about a 2-point improvement versus placebo on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, which is lower than the minimum threshold of a 3-point improvement for clinically meaningful benefit set by an earlier 2004 guidance by the UK's then-named National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.^[3]They have found, repeatedly, that antidepressants either are not more effective than placebo, or they are slightly more effective.>Because of this, their results are not limited to or mostly influenced by the published literature, which is known to be markedly biased in favor of antidepressant drug efficacy. (This is because pharmaceutical companies usually have not published negative studies of antidepressants.)<

Wow

Read it all:
Antidepressants Work for Major Depression! Not so Fast

About the older tricyclics:
from Mayo Clinic: Tricyclic antidepressants and tetracyclic antidepressants