For patients battling severe depression, antidepressant medications are still the best option for treatment, but these drugs may offer little benefit to patients suffering from milder forms of depression, according to a new analysis published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The review, which analyzed data from six previously published placebo-controlled trials that included patients with a broad range of depression severity, suggests that previous research highlighting the benefits of antidepressants may not accurately reflect how medications impact patients with less severe cases of depression. In fact, the researchers conclude that, “…the efficacy of [antidepressant medication] treatment for depression varies considerably as a function of symptom severity,” and, more specifically, that while the true effects of antidepressant drugs were considerable for patients with “very severe symptoms”—such as those that characterize major depressive disorder—for those with mild, moderate or even some severe symptoms, the true benefits of antidepressants over placebo were “nonexistent to negligible.”
