You can stop feeling like it’s your fault that you haven’t found an antidepressant that works. Not that you should have ever felt that way anyway, but most depressed people blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in their lives.
But this one is definitely not your fault, and probably not your doctor’s either, for that matter. Last week a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that publication bias put antidepressants in a more positive light than was warranted by the evidence. To put that in plain English, when drug makers ask the FDA to approve a drug, they have to submit all studies that have been done for that drug, even the ones that show the drug to be less than successful. However, they are under no obligation to publish all the studies in medical journals. They can, and apparently did in this case, cherry-pick the studies and only submit the positive ones for publication. Not only that, some of the negative studies that were published were slanted to make them appear more positive.