Just because antidepressant drugs may not work better than fake pills doesn’t mean they don’t work at all. Antidepressants offer substantial benefits to millions of people suffering from depression. And although the placebo effect is real and powerful, antidepressants do seem to beat out sugar pills in reducing symptoms in the most severely depressed—perhaps about 10 percent of patients (although admittedly, this statistic also means that about 90 percent of depressed patients may be prescribed medication with negligible benefit).
