Psych Researcher Claims Doctors Using Anti-Depressants Incorrectly, Excessively

Last week, on his blog at Psychology Today Narris Ghaemi, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, wrote about the recent WHO study examining the question of anti-depressant use and suicide. I wrote about the WHO study here. The link to suicide is an important question because 30 million Americans take an anti-depressant each day and many tens of millions the world over do as well, and true believers in anti-depressants have fought back very hard against evidence of a link to suicide. As I've noted before, Ghaemi is no fan of anti-depressants.

Anyway, here he writes some of the most sensible words on the issue that I've ever seen come from a doctor.

"We psychiatrists have a problem with antidepressants; we have been so committed to giving them for so long that it is scary to think that they might be harmful. Side effects are bad enough, but suicide seems incredible to imagine. Yet the FDA came to that conclusion about 4 years ago.

"Since then a slew of studies have appeared in psychiatric journals challenging the FDA view; a recent WHO study put them all together, and could be interpreted as showing that clinicians were right all along: antidepressants are safe, at least in adults (the WHO study continues to find risk in children, but less in young adults, unlike the FDA analysis, which found risks of suicide in young adults as well)....

"The FDA review was based on randomized studies; the WHO review on observational studies. The former is more valid than the latter, and thus it still should be believed.

"This is a relatively simply matter, widely agreed upon by those who use statistics, so I do not think we can ignore it. Other arguments about the limits of the FDA analysis also fail: The studies in that analysis were not designed to assess suicide, indeed they excluded highly suicidal people. So much the worse for antidepressants: if suicidality is seen even in those at low risk for it then we really have a problem. Also, the claim that the FDA studies wrongly defined suicidality has been assessed already by a reanalysis of those data assessing truly suicidal behavior, conducted carefully by researchers at Columbia university, and the suicide risk persists.

"I think the link is real, though small, and not inherently due to something evil about antidepressants; rather the problem may be in us, rather than the drugs; it could be that we doctors are just using these drugs excessively or incorrectly."

Gee, I think some of us could've written this.