ArticleBJPsych bulletin2018
Against the stream: Antidepressants are not antidepressants - an alternative approach to drug action and implications for the use of antidepressants.
Article in BJPsych bulletin, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- The METOD study: exploring metabolism, emotional blunting and treatment outcomes in depression - A naturalistic, two-phase observational protocol.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Article
- SSRIs: exploring controversies, conundrums, and contentions-epiphenomenon or empirical ingenuity? A comparative panorama for untangling enigma in children and youths.CNS spectrums · 2025Review
- The Iatrogenic Consequences of Medicalising Grief: Resetting the Research Agenda.Sociology of health & illness · 2025Article
- 'Impaired in life': Analyzing people's accounts of depression in Ethiopia - Implications for a cultural-eco social approach to global mental health.The International journal of social psychiatry · 2025Article
- Leveraging big data for causal understanding in mental health: a research framework.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- More Treatment, but Not Less Anxiety and Mood Disorders: Why? Seven Hypotheses and Their Evaluation.Psychotherapy and psychosomatics · 2023Article
- Perceived outcomes of psychedelic microdosing as self-managed therapies for mental and substance use disorders.Psychopharmacology · 2020Article
- The 'patient voice': patients who experience antidepressant withdrawal symptoms are often dismissed, or misdiagnosed with relapse, or a new medical condition.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2020Article
- 'Prescribing' psychotropic medication to our rivers and estuaries.BJPsych bulletin · 2019Article
- Ideology over evidence?BJPsych bulletin · 2018Article
- Rational antidepressant use.BJPsych bulletin · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although antidepressants are regarded as effective and specific treatments, they are barely superior to placebo in randomised trials, and differences are unlikely to be clinically relevant. The conventional disease-centred understanding of drug action regards antidepressants as targeting an underlying brain process, but an alternative 'drug-centred' view suggests they are psychoactive substances that modify normal mental states and behaviour. These alterations, such as numbing of emotions, may reduce feelings of depression, and also create amplified placebo effects in randomised trials. Patients should be informed that there is no evidence that antidepressants work by correcting a chemical imbalance, that antidepressants have mind-altering effects, and that evidence suggests they produce no noticeable benefit compared with placebo. Declaration of interest The author is co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.