Antidepressants Only Benefit Certain Depressed Patients, Study Suggests

Notice how different this headline is to the way it has been reported in the papers.Antidepressants Only Benefit Certain Depressed Patients, Study Suggests is different to many papers which said antidepressants don't work. That's not quite right. And to be fair, I seem to recall that when fluoxetine first came out it was said that it should only be used for severe depression. But it shows that the way that trials and science is carried out is not well understood popularly, I guess.
"the improvement in depression amongst patients receiving the trial drug, as compared to those receiving placebo (dummy tablets), was not clinically significant in mildly depressed patients or even in most patients who suffer from very severe depression. The benefit only seemed to be clinically meaningful for a small group of patients who were the most extremely depressed to start out with. This improvement seemed to come about because these patients did not respond as well as less depressed patients to placebo, rather than responding better to the drug."