MixedThe Washington Post...readers will take pleasure in what is essentially a guided tour through the Aladdin’s Cave of the tools medicine uses to prove or disprove things: randomly controlled trials, meta-analyses and so forth ... Kramer prevents the tour from becoming a forced march by interweaving interludes from his clinical practice with the main exposition of the data ... But there are several problems. Kramer insists that the debate is over the effectiveness of antidepressants, but there is another school of thought that says the real debate is about how many types of depressions there are and how best to treat them ... it is dismaying that, in this supposedly authoritative account of depression and its preferred remedies, Kramer makes almost no mention of the most effective antidepressant of all, indeed the most effective treatment that psychiatry has in its tool kit: electroconvulsive therapy.
