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I found these two articles that mention that taking SSRI for depression can actually make the depression worse.

Is it true? Can Tardive Dysphoria (delayed depression) be caused by SSRI?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in-america/201106/now-antidepressant-induced-chronic-depression-has-name-tardive-dysphoria

http://www.behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2014/04/08/antidepressants-make-things-worse-in-the-long-term/

They seem pretty convincing and I can't find anything against it but if it's true, it basically means that depression treatment is going back to the 60's before SSRI were invented (or it should even though that's billions in losses for big pharma).

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  • Human response to SSRI medications varies immensely from person to person, so it's certainly plausible (based on anecdotal accounts, at least) that SSRI use can cause worsening of symptoms in some people, just as it can result in great benefits to others (such as those reported by Mark Chu-Carroll, author of Good Math, Bad Math). Depression medications are still somewhat ineffective, on average, but "going back to the 60's" seems a bit excessive.
    – DumpsterDoofus
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:06
  • @DumpsterDoofus Well they describe in those articles that it can happen to a large percentage of patients which is very concerning. I don't think a medication that's making things worse should be used.
    – user22503
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 21:54
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    "I don't think a medication that's making things worse should be used." Medications that have the potential to make things worse are used in patient treatment all the time. Strong antibacterial agents are known to sometimes cause rebound intestinal bacterial infections as a result of the disruption of the ambient intestinal flora. Statins can result in diabetes that can increase risk of the very heart attacks that they are designed to mitigate. The value of a medication is determined by whether it's potential benefits outweigh the liabilities incurred by its risks.
    – DumpsterDoofus
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 22:51
  • @DumpsterDoofus: can you turn this expertise into a referenced answer? Please avoid using the comments for pseudo answers.
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 1:25
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    I remember reading a book about SSRIs named The Emperor's New Drugs. It was relatively science heavy, the first few chapters had several meta-analyses of the medical literature on SSRIs. The author's general conclusion was that due to systematic problems with how we perform clinical trials, SSRIs were consistently shown to have statistically significant effects, but when those drugs were compared against drugs that didn't target depression at all and had similar symptoms to the SSRIs, it showed SSRIs were no better than placebo.
    – Jack
    Commented Oct 21, 2014 at 6:08

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