If the drugs don't work anymore... well hey, they might never have worked!

Here's an exciting twist in the world of figuring out what the hell antidepressants are doing to your brain chemistry:

It cannot be assumed that an antidepressant has lost its effectiveness if a patient relapses while continuing on the medication, because the medication may never have been effective in the first place, according to study findings reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In the study, the majority of relapses occurred in patients who had never been true responders, Dr. Mark Zimmerman, director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, told Reuters Health.

Some patients with major depressive disorder, similar to other medical disorders, respond to placebo, Zimmerman explained. In clinical practice, everyone is given an active drug, so it's not clear if a patient who responds has improve because of the drug.

Ha! This is outstanding for a couple reasons, in particular because it helps prove to a subset of people that their own minds were actually more in the loop about their mental health than they gave themselves credit for:

Using two different methods of estimating relapse, the researchers found that the majority of relapses occurred because the patients were never true responders to the drugs.

This suggests, Zimmerman told Reuters Health, "that a message can be conveyed to patients who have repeatedly improved on medication and then lost its benefit that perhaps they are more capable than they think in bringing their own resources to bear to improve their depression."

Go Team Science!