Depression: Everything just placebo?
For years, one could read everywhere that depression - strictly scientific - are mainly the result of a metabolic disorder in the brain. And that's why only medications work against it. Now a new study is causing a stir: Whether depressive people take psychotropic drugs or sugar pills, say British scientists, does not matter - the effect is about the same in both cases.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde author Irene Stratenwerth
It's not about questions that can be argued in the ivory tower. But a suffering from - in Germany alone - millions of people, including especially many women. One in four goes through depression during their lifetime.
So, ask yourself if the scientists found anything useful when they critically scrutinized 47 studies submitted by drug manufacturers to the US Food and Drug Administration. It was a specific type of antidepressant, the so-called serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI).
Such admission studies are only partially comparable with reality in everyday psychiatric life: they only last for four to eight weeks. And all the patients who participate in it experience an increased level of attention and attention during this time. This is probably one of the reasons why even those men and women who only had placebo during this study felt significantly better.
The study also found that drugs were most effective in the group of severely depressed individuals. This is not surprising: many studies have shown in recent years that Exercise, massages or short psychotherapies for mild to moderate depression work just as well as tablets.
Especially in the severe cases, however, drugs often create the conditions for such therapeutically valuable activities. And their Successes do not show up after weeks, but only after months or even years. Especially in these cases, a short-term discontinuation of the medication is now urgently warned - because the resulting disease recurrence not infrequently ends in suicide.
Therapists and sufferers have known it for a long time: There is no cure for depression. It often takes a lot of patience and time to find the right drug or non-drug agent and the right dose in the individual case, leading out of the dark tunnel of depression. The treatment of this disease is just as complex as its causes: Psychological, genetic, hormonal or physical factors play a role that is still unexplored in detail.
Anyone who strives for therapeutic advances for each individual patient and each individual patient, hardly deserves scientific laurels. Studies that stir up fear and helplessness get a lot more attention. The price for such dubious honors, however, is paid by the very people whose welfare should actually come first for the depression researchers.
