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Major New Study Confirms Antidepressants Really Do Work (theguardian.com)
According to authors of a groundbreaking study, antidepressants really do work in treating depression, though some are more effective than others. "Millions more people around the world should be prescribed pills or offered talking therapies, which work equally well for moderate to severe depression, say the doctors, noting that just one in six people receive proper treatment in the rich world -- and one in 27 in the developing world," reports The Guardian. From the report: "Antidepressants are an effective tool for depression. Untreated depression is a huge problem because of the burden to society," said Andrea Cipriani of the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, who led the study. The debate over antidepressants has unfortunately often been ideological, said Cipriani. Some doctors and patients have doubts over whether they work at all and point to the big placebo effect -- in trials, those given dummy pills also improve to some degree. Some people suspect drug companies of fiddling trial results. Some patients simply do not want to take pills for a mental health condition. The study published in the Lancet took six years, Cipriani said, and included all the published and unpublished data that the scientists could find. It was carried out by a team of international experts. They looked at results after eight weeks of more than 500 trials involving either a drug versus placebo or comparing two different medicines. The most famous antidepressant of them all, Prozac -- now out of patent and known by its generic name, fluoxetine -- was one of the least effective but best tolerated, measured by a low drop-out rate in the trials or fewer side-effects reported. The most effective of the drugs was amitriptyline, which was the sixth best tolerated.
Or, we stop our worship of the false God Nature, and start realizing that our bodies are no longer adequate to the task at hand. Instead of punishing ourselves for living how we want to live, we start figuring out how to live how we want to live without the consequences (or alternately, change the instinct driving our motivation). Chemicals are one such help.
We don't go outside because obviously we don't want to. It's dirty, the weather is unpredictable, there are animals & insects carrying disease, too hot/too cold, too bright/to dim. Etc. Wherein we have a plethora of technologies to fix these problems in small space indoors. We may have created some problems in so doing, we need to determine what they are and design them out. If we need more UV exposure, we have product for that. If indoor air quality is low, we have product for that.
We eat poorly primarily due to what our body is telling us about food, and why it is telling us these things. The drive for more fat and more starches is not surprising if you consider that starvation was a major concern in our evolution, and managing it was key to survival. Fat and starch cravings push the unformed mind to make good survival choices. We're well past that now in most of the world, and what our bodies are demanding is no longer optimal for our health. We either need to suppress these instincts or deal with the symptoms. It seems like suppression is probably the way to go, the other side is mostly whack-a-mole.
Sleep is a tougher nut to crack. Losing 33% of our day (or more, depending on who you talk to) is a huge imposition. It seems unlikely that we're soon going to turn in to a society that can simply sleep when it wants, nor that we will actually want it if given the choice. We probably should be focusing on ways to get the most out of what little sleep we get. It seems we understand all of this very little right now. Other choices might be that since we are no longer held to a farmer's schedule, maybe work schedules based on rising with the sun are not necessary or ideal.
In the meantime, while we bake actual solutions up, things that treat the symptoms seem fine. Provide the side-effects are known and the users are free to do the cost benefit analysis. I personally stay away from anti-depressants, not because I do not need them (I am fairly certain I do), but the side effects are sketchy.