Controversial claims that psychiatric medications have very small effect sizes and so may be “not worth the bother” have been brought into perspective by a systematic review of meta-analyses comparing psychiatric drugs with those of general medicine.
While the authors point out that comparisons of trials with vastly different outcomes are fraught, they conclude “psychiatric drugs were not generally less efficacious than other drugs”.
Comparing almost 100 meta-analyses of 48 drugs in 20 medical disorders with 33 meta-analyses of 16 drugs in eight psychiatric disorders, the researchers from the US and Germany found the standard mean difference between active drugs and placebos clustered around 0.4 for both parts of medicine.
“The efficacy of psychotropic drugs is supported” and the effect sizes of...
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