60 Minutes on antidepressants

I saw shortly before it was to air that tonight's episode of 60 Minutes would feature a story about people questioning the effectiveness of antidepressants, and wondered if they'd talk to Irving Kirsch. Turns out the report centered around him:



On the one hand, some qualifications about placebos were left out. On the other, so were many of the arguments from his book. The FDA guy came off looking like a dolt (really? it's "basic statistics" that given an unlimited number of company-sponsored trials it's highly unlikely that you'll find two showing a drug's effectiveness?), while the British regulatory representative came off as pretty sharp.

I'll have to watch again, but my initial reaction is that they did a decent job, and I'm very pleased to see another strong impetus toward discussion.