A few days ago the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released statistics showing that anti-depressants are, by far, the most prescribed of all drugs, surpassing prescriptions to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and all other maladies. In 2005 alone, 118 million prescriptions were written in the U.S. for anti-depressants.

Many psychiatrists, according to news reports, hailed this statistic as A GOOD SIGN and GOOD NEWS because, in the words of one shrink, "Americans finally feel comfortable asking for help with psychiatric problems." Needless to say, pharmaceutical companies that manufacture Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro and the other anti-depressants were also excited by the news that 25 percent of all adults in the U.S. will "have a major depressive episode at some point in their lives" and will resort to anti-depressant drugs to treat the symptoms.

There is a major flaw in this reasoning and an insidiously dark undercurrent to the statistic that the news media overlooked, an oversight which reveals how ill-served we are by their short attention spans and fuzzy thinking.

In 1998, two psychologists writing in a well-respected medical journal stumbled across a revelation that should have undermined the credibility of the entire anti-depressant industry. These researchers analyzed the results of 39 studies on the effectiveness of anti-depressant drugs and found that 50 percent of the therapeutic benefits could be attributed to the placebo effect. That is to say, people's expectations that the drugs would be effective triggered their own body's natural healing mechanism and accounted for half of the benefits they felt from taking the drug.

When these same two researchers subsequently evaluated 19 more recent double-blind studies on depression, the placebo effect shot up to account for 75 percent of the effectiveness of each drug therapy. (Kirsch, Irving, and Sapirstein, Guy. "Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo: A meta-analysis of antidepressant medication." Prevention & Treatment, 1998, June; 1(1).

So here we have a situation where the most profitable drugs known to humankind are being directly marketed to doctors and consumers, who are being sold on the idea that these anti-depressants are a panacea. Individual consumers spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars each on these drugs. Doctors over-prescribe them, patients over-use them, and Big Pharma gets rich. And yet 75 percent of the beneficial effects are nothing more than the patient's own power of suggestion at work!

Antidepressants are now right up there with bottled water and synthetic vitamins as my top ranking scams on consumers.