Since virtually all studies of new antidepressants are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, it is of the companies’ interest to choose people that are more likely to respond, says Dubovsky, which means the list of exclusion criteria is long.

Wow. That’s hugely problematic.

I mainly attribute my recovery from OCD to sertraline and burpropion, but sometimes I wonder if it was just a placebo effect. When you’ve gone to so many counsellors and therapy sessions and nothing clicks, you’re pretty much desperate to try anything else. And using prescription drugs kind of puts a healthy distance between your self and your mental illness in the sense that it makes you look at it objectively as an illness, not a character flaw.

Psychiatric medicine is still in its infancy and I’m excited to see what sort of findings science will uncover in coming years, especially since more and more people are “coming out” about having a mental health condition.