Is a combo of pills and talking the best remedy for depression?
Walk into any high school classroom in the country today, and chances are at least one student there is suffering from a debilitating illness called depression. But when parents seek help for their children, they all too often find themselves frustrated by a lack of information on how best to treat the psychiatric disorder. Despite the high rate of depression in kids, remedies have for the most part been untested, so families of these kids have been left to grope in the dark. Last week the darkness lifted a bit, when researchers made public the results of the first study to compare depression treatments in teenagers. The headline of their work: Nearly 3 in 4 of their young patients improved significantly with a combination of psychotherapy and Prozac, a popular brand of the antidepressant drug class known as SSRI s. Of the 439 teens who participated in the nationwide study, 61 percent of those receiving Prozac alone got better after 12 weeks of treatment. Psychiatrists widely praised t
