system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's the efficacy of antidepressants when compared to placebos in clinical studies?
gpt
This is a controversial topic.  While antidepressants haven't appeared to do much better than placebos in many studies, this doesn't mean that antidepressants can't be very effective.  The reason being that there are likely many underlying causes of depression.

For example, say we do a study and find that 25% of the subjects responded to the placebo and 25% responded to the specific antidepressant being tested.  That can look like the drug is fairly useless. But what if it was because only 25% of the subjects had a type of depression that would be affected by the action of that particular drug?  For those people with that type of depression that drug could be effective close to 100% of the time. We would need further research to know for sure.

We do know from case studies that people can respond well to some antidepressants while getting no help from others. The difficulty comes in the diagnosis and understanding of the underlying causes of the depression.  Statistics out of context can be misleading.