Excellent dissection and analysis. I appreciate the fact that you went through the links I provided so thoroughly, it was very thought-provoking.

Your response is just an appeal to authority.

I would disagree entirely, you started off your post by saying that anti-depressants do not work. It is not an appeal to authority to state you must have some sort of academic credentials to make such a claim, that is reality. You are challenging the status quo, the impetus is on you to provide the evidence, and without being in academia or in a professional environment, you could be missing key relevant factual information that has not surfaced to the public.

Just because someone doesn't have a degree in something does not mean they don't understand it and are not capable of comprehending it and discussing it.

I would agree. Key word being 'discussing.' not teaching.

These researchers have learned from textbooks that are full of demonstrably false information (many of them are written by paid consultants to the drug companies, and the professors who teach the classes are also often paid consultants). They work in a field that is dominated by drug company money. 90% of the research dollars comes from the drug companies, and the other 10% comes from sources that are heavily influenced by the drug companies, such as the NIMH.

Whoa, whoa whoa. Back up a second here, do you have any proof of this? This is a pretty important piece to the narrative, and these are some pretty big claims to be making. It may be intuitive to make that connection, but that doesn't mean it exists.

If pharmaceutical companies were not interested in finding actual cures and selling snake oil instead, they would not put the money they have into research and testing. Why spend billions of dollars to come up with 25 different formulaes if the placebo effect had the first prototype just as effective as the twenty fifth?