SSRIs literally saved my life, no question about it. Night and day difference, from daily panic attacks destroying my life, happiness, and career, to being almost completely better in 2 weeks after starting. I tried exercise and diet and meditation and you name it, for years!, before I gave medication a go.

Do not care what the science says. It 100% worked for me. Please get help if you need it, tens of millions of people use this medicine successfully

Articles like this are part of the narrative that SSRIs in general are no better than placebo. Absolutely not true for me!

Same here, after struggling for 39 years, glp-1 + SSRI + ADHD meds have made me a normal productive human, and 2 years ago I had pretty much given up on the possibility.

Having a child forced me to fix my life, and I'm incredibly happy because of it.

I have tried prozac in my teens and zoloft in my 30s. Prozac made me dissociate pretty hard, I found myself between classes not knowing where I was coming from or going. Zoloft did nothing but give me the zaps when I came off it.

There have been some serious efforts made to reproduce the original groundbreaking results that showed how effective SSRIs were, without much success. Anecdotally, I know plenty of people who have benefited from them, so I would not say they are ineffective as a blanket statement. I do think it’s important to understand that nobody really knows how these drugs will impact any one individual, and it’s trial and error to find something that may help.

Had you tried a placebo without knowing that it was a placebo? No? Then your story's irrelevant to whether the medication's working (yes, even on you) any better than a placebo would.

I think it’s important to note the headline that it’s specifically about children. Maybe Prozac is effective for adults but not kids in that range?

Hopefully people don’t see articles like this (for depression) and think the results are the same for anxiety disorders.

Placebo works very well for many people too! That's precisely the thing. That's what makes these studies tricky.

If you're a doctor, and if Prozac helps your patients, then it's obviously excellent. You should keep writing prescriptions.

If you're a scientist, you obviously want to distinguish between "real" drugs and drugs that help because people believe they should. So, you do these kinds of tests.

And then, from the perspective of ethics, once you know it's just placebo, you kinda shouldn't keep giving it to people, even if it helps? Maybe? I don't know. That's the weird part.

This seems like bias against the placebo effect.

Spitballing here. I always understood stuff like this as "the system doesn't care about you, it cares about the masses." If the result is overwhelmingly looking no better than a placebo, then the small number of people it actually helps is sort of irrelevant. The exception might be cases where people are willing to drop a bomb of cash for lifesaving drugs for rare diseases (Pharma Bro got a lot of flack for massively jacking up the price of one of these drugs.) I don't know what implications such a study may have in a complex space. I imagine the drug will still be available for those who want to try, but far less prescribed as a sort of safe default. I doubt drug companies will care much for this, since the patent has long expired.

You should have tried placebo first

> Articles like this are part of the narrative that SSRIs in general are no better than placebo. Absolutely not true for me!

Does "placebo" mean "no effect" to some people? Placebo absolutely has an effect. Testimonies like this are on the level of "vaccines caused autism" pseudoscience and the serotonin theory of depression isn't even taught any more. It belongs in the bin of crackpot treatments like chiropractic. There is zero chance Prozac would receive FDA approval today.