Reply #29: I guess "mild" in this case means "mild as major depressions go," [View All]

[Jackpine Radical]

not "mild as in not very significant." Mostly, "mildly" depressed people manage to go on with their lives and struggle through, but without much joy and with an impaired ability to concentrate, etc., while people with severe depressions are almost totally immobilized, and are likely to be hospitalized--or at least they used to be, when we still has a halfway functional health care system in this country.

Anyway, back to the original thread on St. Johns wort--the litereature I have seen, much of it European, seems to indicate that St. Johns wort is about as effective as antidepressants. Actually, that's not saying a whole lot. For many people, antidepressants are not hugely effective. For a somewhat dated review of the antidepressant literature, see Peter Breggin's books {i]Talking Back to Prozac and the Antidepressant Fact Book.

There s also a recent meta-analysis of antidepressant studies submitted to the FDA that shows the treatment effect of these medications to be relatively small. The authors had to use the FOIA to force some of the negative studies out of the FDA files. I can't recall the authors' names, but the study was published in a good, peer-reviewed journal within the past year or 2.