Hi, author of the blog post here! Thank you for sharing your experience with antidepressants, I'm really glad it worked for you & made your life better.

I did mention the following at the end of the "antidepressants" section, but reading your comment convinced me to move it further up. The intro now reads:

> The "standardised effect size" of antidepressants on depression, vs placebo, is around 0.4. (On average; some people respond much better or much worse.)

Also, I wasn't expecting my article to do well on Hacker News; thank you everyone for the comments & critiques! I'll edit the blog post as I go along, to refine it in response to your comments.

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isoprophlex 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My personerino let me be ridiculous and fawn a bit, and tell you that you're one of my internet heroes.

Don't take it as criticism, more of a personal take on figuring out what antidepressants do for me. Furthermore, since posting that parent comment I've converted my vit. D dose to IUs and I realised i'm only taking 800 IUs daily. So a thank you for clueing me in on that, and who knows what happens if I up that. Maybe you were right all along and all i DID need was a heroic dose of vitamin D. (... thats what she said)

	▲	ncasenmare 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Aw, thank you for your kind words! I hope the extra D helps! ^_^

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marcd35 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for the blog post! I live in New England and always had the winter blues, always just assumed it was because of the weather but never acted on it.

About a week ago, there was a reddit post claiming it's actually geographically impossible for anyone where I live to produce enough Vitamin D naturally from the sun alone, due to the shorter days and lower angles throughout the day. I had no idea.

	▲	ncasenmare 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you! I relate; I live in Montréal, close to New England, with similar climate. The current UV Index for Montréal is... 0. And the current UV Index for Boston is... 0.6. (1.6 later today) I can't find a rigorous academic source right now, but the top web results all say we need at least UV Index 3 for our skin to be able to make enough Vitamin D. I guess summer may work for us, in the Montreal/New England area, but other than that, yeah, you and I will need to get Vitamin D from diet and/or supplements. And fish is expensive, so supplements it is.