Discuss “Questioning the effectiveness of antidepressants”

About a month ago, a spate of news articles popped up with the bold headline, “Prozac doesn’t work,” written in response to a scholarly article from earlier this year that throws doubt on the efficacy of a class of anti-depressant medications (the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs), of which Prozac is a member. Aside from the newspaper and magazine responses, the article’s findings set off a rash of posts in the blogosphere and an impassioned, if quiet, debate.

The article in question took the form of a large review, or meta-analysis, of all of the available studies conducted to test the efficacy of SSRIs such as Prozac and Effexor, including some analyses that were not published by the drug companies that conducted...