antidepressants ebooks

Grief and Medication: When Medication Helps

Antidepressants have never been shown to work on grief itself - not once, in any properly controlled trial. The best study ever run, 395 bereaved people with a real placebo and a real clinician-rated outcome, found that adding an antidepressant to grief therapy improved the depression that came with the loss and did nothing measurable for the grief: a number needed to treat of 84. What worked in that same trial was 16 sessions of grief-focused therapy, which more than doubled the response rate. Meanwhile the placebo group improved at 54.8% - more than half of what gets credited to the tablet was going to happen anyway. This guide holds all of that at once, without either demonising medication or pretending it does something it has not been shown to do. It covers the trial in full, the side effects nobody volunteers, how to taper off safely, what NICE actually tells your GP to do first, and the questions that turn a prescription into a conversation.