Antidepressants DO NOT make people happier, major research claims

A study done today said that antidepressants don’t make people happier than not taking any medication.

The analysis found that patients who took the drugs did not have a significantly better quality of life than depressed people who did not take the pills.

Researchers looked at 17.5 million American adults who had been depressed for over 10 years, about half of whom used drugs and the other half did not.

The results showed a slight improvement in mental health in both groups, regardless of whether they took antidepressants.

Researchers from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia requested more long-term studies of patients taking antidepressants to evaluate their effects on quality of life.

NHS doctors have long moved away from prescribing drugs that can cause a number of side effects.

Healthcare now recommends group therapy sessions before pills to patients with mild depression.

But independent experts said no firm conclusions can be drawn from the study, as those taking the drugs tend to be more depressed at first, so it’s not a fair comparison.

They insisted that other clinical studies had shown the drugs to improve overall quality of life.

Around 7.3 million adults – 17% of the adult population – took antidepressants in the UK from 2017 to 2018, when data were last available.

Some of the most commonly prescribed are citalopram, sertraline, and fluoxetine under the brand names Celexa, Zoloft, and Prozac.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, approximately 27.6 million (13.2%) people over the age of 18 in the United States regularly used the drug between 2015 and 2018.

The most recent study, published in the journal PLO UNO, used data from people interviewed and health-checked as part of another study.

These included all adults in the country who were diagnosed with depression and were not hospitalized.

Their mean age was 48 years and they were predominantly female (67.9%).

More than half were using antidepressants, 43% were not taking the drug, but had a clinical diagnosis.

Researchers checked health-related quality of life scores when first identified from the database and two years later.

The measure is used by the CDC as an indicator of both mental and physical quality of life and is determined by patients who answer survey questions about their health.

It is divided into two areas: mental and physical health. Healthy people usually score around 90 on the scale.

Mental health scores increased in both groups within two years, while physical scores decreased.

The mental health scores of drug users increased by an average of 2.9% from 40.32 to 41.50. Physical health points dropped 1.5% from 42.5 to 41.85.

Meanwhile, the mental health scores of those who did not use antidepressants increased by 2.2% from 42.99 to 43.92. His physical points dropped from 43.86 to 43.31 (1.3%).

Dr. Saudi University clinical pharmacist Omar Almohammed said there was no statistical difference between those who took the drug and those who did not.

This suggests that taking antidepressants does not significantly improve quality of life over time.

However, independent experts criticized the study for failing to take into account the difference in depression levels between the two groups.

Dr. Gemma Lewis, a psychiatrist at University College London, said: “In this study, people who took antidepressants had a worse quality of life and were probably more depressed than those who did not take them.

‘This kind of distortion is difficult to remove in such a naturalistic work without an experimental design.

“Clinical studies with experimental designs have shown that antidepressants improve mental health-related quality of life.”

Professor Eduard Vieta, a psychiatrist at the University of Barcelona, ​​said: “The main limitation of this article is that, as is often the case with this type of work, the confounding factor is an indication.

“The inability to control the severity of depression between two different groups is a critical flaw, and so we can learn very little from this data.”