Comment by Aurornis
8 hours ago
> The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective,
But that’s exactly what many claim. Even this article is trying to claim that Vitamin D has 4.5X higher effect size than antidepressants (e.g. that they don’t work)
> It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?
USA is actually not the world leader in over medication in this domain, even though it’s popular and safe to hate on Americans. The rates of benzodiazepine and Z-drug prescription in some countries like France are substantially higher than the USA.
The "hate" on antidepressants is mostly from a place of "The kids are taking pills for things that aren't diseases and just need to get out more" and other stupid takes about how "back in my day we didn't have this much mental illness", which is why the hate is maintained even for things like ADHD medications which are so thoroughly proven scientifically that they are one of the best proven treatments humans have access to for any disease.
Similarly, SSRIs have much better evidence in treatments for many other situations, like anxiety, and yet the medicine itself is attacked, not using it to poorly treat a disorder we barely even begin to understand.
The "hate" is not based in science, despite the fact that SSRIs are objectively a mediocre treatment for depression.
We just don't really have much in terms of better treatments because we know so damn little about depression.
The medical community knows SSRIs are mediocre and have a low success rate at treating depression. They don't have better tools. Everything is a bad treatment for depression because "depression" is a loose collection of symptoms and statistics that we have really poor understanding of, and will certainly be broken up into the actual diseases that make it up when we figure them out, and we will be able to medicate those diseases more effectively.
Every single doctor that would prescribe you an SSRI for your depression will also prescribe vitamin D supplementation if your blood shows low levels.
Someday we will also have a situation where we are going to have to admit that for some subset of the population, their depression has no cause other than "Your life is utterly terrible, for reasons entirely outside of your control, and nothing I can do as a medical professional can fix that".
>The "hate" is not based in science
The lingering roots of Calvinism in the US cause us all kinds of problems.
"You were born broken because god made you that way, don't make yourself better, and hurry up and die" permeates huge parts of our culture. It's why lots of other cultures look at us and what we do with relative confusion.