Ah, The Contradictory World of Depression Treatment

You may have noticed that often one research study will say X while another study will say Y about treating depression. Part of that, of course, is tied in with the fact that researchers are working with different patient populations (ie, this group has underlying heart disease, that group smokes crack, etc.) and they are often asking slightly different research questions. At least, that's how docs will explain a day like this with three different assertions about depression treatment being released. One says that women who stop taking anti-depressants during depression wind up being depressed. Another says that depression treatment doesn't do diddly for patients with underlying diabetes. The last says that exercise beats depression and that, as a result, first-line treatment for mild to moderate depression should be exercise not meds.

The bottom line, however, is that the researchers are still treating depression with the same essential medication therapies and getting divergent results. You make of that whatever you want.

The most troubling of these studies is the one on pregnancy, which was being reported on network television. The study concludes that the longstanding practice of having women go off anti-depressants during pregnancy due to concerns over damage to a fetus is a bad idea (it doesn't address post-partum depression, if you were wondering). What was interesting, too, is that 27 percent of the women who stayed on anti-depressants during pregnancy wound up getting depressed.

So here we are 15 years or so into the psychopharmacological revolution and we are still getting hit with inconsistent results and contradictory assertions. Nice.