substitute | The antidepressant-debunking study

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The antidepressant-debunking study

There was a news release today about a study that appears to show the uselessness of popular antidepressants.

This was reported in the Guardian, among other places. The publication can be read here.

There are problems, as summarized:

~~PlOS is not an academic peer-reviewed journal.~~ edit: They are in fact peer-reviewed, based on better information I have received by comments. Read the threads. They say they are peer-reviewed, but when you read their FAQ, you'll see this: "We involve the academic community in our peer review process as much as possible. After professional staff have determined that the paper falls within the scope of the journal, and is of a minimum acceptable quality, decisions on whether to send a paper out for in-depth review are made via a collaboration between experienced, professional editors who work full time at PLoS, and academic editors who are experts in their field."

I'm not saying this is Wikipedia, but it's not the same thing as a traditional journal, either.
It's one study. Beware of an equivalency between "one metastudy showed that these three or four drugs didn't show a good outcome under these conditions" and "antidepressants don't work."
The study measured outcomes at six weeks. That isn't very long in a depression treatment, whether you're using Prozac or a trampoline.

That having been said, anything that keeps family doctors from throwing the best-advertised drug at every problem is going to be helpful at this juncture. And using any kind of medication (except possibly the trampoline) without counseling is, well, crazy.

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What's "brand new" about the model? With "old" journals, scientists do the real work (writing articles, and reviewing articles) for free. With "new" journals, scientists still do that work for free. The *only* difference is that the "new" journals cut out the useless, parasitic middlemen who run academic publishing companies. If there's another difference, you haven't demonstrated it yet.

As someone who worked as a professional copy editor at a medical journal for years, I represent that remark.

Well, I was talking about the people who *run* the publishing companies, and there are situations where even with a "professional" organization being involved (e.g., ACM-organized conferences in computer science), copy editing can be an issue (where by "an issue" I mean "something that never happens".)

Don't get me started on the decline of copy editing or I will immediately turn into a 100-year-old man waving his cane like grampa Simpson.

Well, didn't you read my post about how I wanted to quit grad school in order to become a copy editor for CS conference proceedings?

First Wikipedia, and now you want to volunteer to copy edit?

Are you repeating some kind of abuse here?

I'm hoping I could get them to pay me, sort of like being a professional submissive (but not really, since I'd get to be dominant by messing with other people's writing.)

And if I could get paid $30/hour with health insurance to edit Wikipedia 40 hours a week, I would do it.

And, what I meant about a brand new model is: I don't know yet! And I'm conservative about things like medical research. Having information freely available is a great good. Not knowing about the practices of a new publishing medium, I want to know for sure that the good things about the old model haven't been tossed out with the bad.

A newspaper article about a study, and even the web site of the publishing organization, didn't give me that. Hence my questions.

Well, in your opinion, what were the good things about the old model?

I think we're talking about two different things.

The old model of "gotta pay for science information" sucked. I won't weep for its death.

If there is a new model, I want to know what may have changed *other than* making it free. If the answer is "nothing, it's just not trapped under a layer of money and restricted information" then I'm delighted.

I was concerned because I didn't know if they'd turned medicine into a wikiLOL or a club for a particular point of view while they were doing the laudable work of making an open infrastructure. Apparently they're not, unless my anonymous commentor is making shit up. He or she appears to have good info.

Well, I've heard talks by the people who run PLOS, etc., and there's no particular reason to go for any of that kind of FUD. They're just scientists, doing the work scientists do, as well or badly as any other scientists, but unlike most, they've finally gotten the backbone necessary to stand up and kick out the dead weight (publishers).

That's good to know.

For me, FUD and psychiatric research are inseparable. I treat this with pasta, which has no peer-reviewed study in its favor but a truly awesome placebo effect.

Well, okay, but if the same questionable study had appeared in JAMA, you presumably wouldn't be calling the traditional publishing model into question, right? Double standards...

My favorite antidepressants are hookers and blow. Sometimes I overdo the blow and it wraps around to having the opposite effect, but then I soothe myself with more hookers.

It wasn't a double standard two hours ago. It was caution, solely.

Now that people I trust have given me better information, there's no reason for me to distrust the publisher.

And whoa there, presumer! If a study comes out with radically different news about something in medicine, it's one study wherever it comes from. The question of how the study was published in the first place is at another layer!

And whoa there, presumer! If a study comes out with radically different news about something in medicine, it's one study wherever it comes from. The question of how the study was published in the first place is at another layer!

I don't know what you mean. If the same study came out in JAMA, I assume you would still be posting about it, but I assume you wouldn't be saying "Hey, let's look at those freaks at JAMA and question how their review process works just because of this one paper."

I would, in fact, not change my behavior based on one study of anything. And if anyone said "hey look they just showed that antidepressants don't work" I would say don't change your behavior based on a news story about one study.

Note that this is two of the three points I listed in my original post, which had nothing to do with the publishing source.

And yes, I did question PLoS. They were new to me, and their FAQ was poorly written. That is all I knew. When I see people posting all over the internet about a shocking new study from an unfamiliar source, I don't immediately say "wow! that must be true!" I question! And I got answers, and accepted them.

What should have been my response to a publication from an unknown nontraditional source, other than questioning it on the Internet and getting better information?

It's rather knee-jerk to even insinuate that PLoS is like Wikipedia ("I'm not saying this is Wikipedia...") without doing the research first.

Guilty.

I assume that every new thing I see on the Internet is horseshit until I find out differently. Particularly so when it involves health or safety, and even more particularly when it's a topic that half the people on the Internet have strongly held beliefs about.

BTW, I edited the original post to correct my initial reaction.

Then you ought to assume that every single new thing you hear about anywhere is horseshit until you find out differently, too. In 2008, the Internet is distinct from other fora that humans use for communication how?

I am really not sure what we are doing other than poking each other with sticks, here.

The Internet is the world's best medium for quickly spreading rumors, chain letters, and other memetic disasters. There's a good reason why snopes.com does so well with their "inboxer."

One news story linked from three livejournals to one study published in a way I've never heard of rates about two notches above "chain letter" and slightly below "the news." Your own filter may vary. I don't tell you what to trust, and I doubt you trust very many things either. Do we have to have the same filters?

Am I allowed to suggest more complexity in people's analyses when they lazily dismiss things that I happen to have the experience to evaluate and have already done so?

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substitute.livejournal.com - 2008-02-27 03:04 (UTC) - Expand

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catamorphism.livejournal.com - 2008-02-27 03:17 (UTC) - Expand

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substitute.livejournal.com - 2008-02-27 03:26 (UTC) - Expand

Not knowing about the practices of a new publishing medium, I want to know for sure that the good things about the old model haven't been tossed out with the bad.

My impression is that the biggest change in medical publishing isn't the "real" open-access journals like PLoS's—called "gold OA"—but open-access repositories, called "green OA". These haven't done very well, because scientists don't bother to post to repositories unless someone makes them, even if the journal explicitly allows it (and many toll-access journals do). This, despite pretty good evidence that open access, not surprisingly, increases exposure and therefore increases "impact". Scientists are insanely conservative. The high-energy physicists may have started xxx.lanl.gov because it was the smart thing to do, but I'm sure the only reason they keep using it is habit.

However, the NIH is about to mandate that all journal articles resulting from NIH-funded research be posted to PubMed. In the long term, funder mandates mean that the old model will work even more badly than it already does (serials crisis? what serials crisis?), because there's no need for institutions to subscribe to journals if the articles are freely available. The journals will have to convert to "author pays" (which will really mean "funder pays") to survive. But that really has nothing to do with peer review.

I really like the idea of Green OA.

You might find Stevan Harnad's rants interesting, though the one I linked to looks somewhat restrained.

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