Critiquing the Critique: Resisting Commonplace Criticisms of Antidepressants in Online Platforms

Critiques of antidepressants in public spaces such as print media, blogs, social media, websites, and radio and television programs are now commonplace. Such critiques typically center on issues such as the side effects and risks of antidepressants, overblown claims of effectiveness, the fallacy of the chemical imbalance hypothesis, overprescribing, and the availability of equally or more effective nonmedication interventions for depression. In this article, we employ a discursive analysis to show how online commenters fashion a particular counter-argument to these critiques. Prominent in this counter-argument is that only “real” depression benefits from antidepressants, and that a “one-size-does-not-fit-all” understanding of these medications is needed. We argue that, while this nuanced counter-critique contains features that make it difficult to undermine, it simultaneously embeds many unanswered questions.