Bitter Pill: In January, Erick Turner, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University and a clinician at the Portland VA Medical Center, shook up the medical community, provoked the pharmaceutical establishment and, perhaps, disappointed millions of depressed Americans. He published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that revealed antidepressants are not as effective as we’ve been led to believe. For years, he implied, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (maker of Zoloft) and Forest Laboratories (Celexa and Lexapro) have vastly exaggerated the performance of their drugs.
Turner calls it the “dirty little secret” of the psychiatric world. [...]
Turner himself still prescribes antidepressants but admits he is careful not to overplay their benefits to patients in order not to give them false hope after decades of hype around the drugs.
