Efficacy of antidepressant: a picture of blissClinical trials provide compelling evidence for antidepressant effectiveness, with thousands of positive trials over the past five decades [Hollon et al. 2002]. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold-standard methodology for assessing efficacy, in which patients are assigned in a double-blind fashion to a placebo (inert 'sugar pill') or active-drug group.Meta-analyses of RCTs typically report antidepressants as 20-30% more effective than placebo, The drugs don't work? antidepressants and the current and future pharmacological management of depression Elizabeth Penn and Derek K. Tracy Abstract: Depression is a potentially life-threatening disorder affecting millions of people across the globe. It is a huge burden to both the individual and society, costing over £9 billion in 2000 alone: the World Health Organisation (WHO) cited it as the third leading cause of global disability in 2004 (first in the developed world), and project it will be the leading cause by 2030. The serendipitous discovery of antidepressants has revolutionized both our understanding and management of depression: however, their efficacy in the treatment of depression has long been debated and recently been brought very much into the public limelight by a controversial publication by Kirsch, in which the role of placebo response in antidepressant efficacy trials is highlighted. Whilst antidepressants offer benefits in both the short and long term, important problems persist such as intolerability, delayed therapeutic onset, limited efficacy in milder depression and the existence of treatment-resistant depression.

I present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation. In such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today, but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future. The model can be used to characterize both long-term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted.

This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single-peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy-proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is necessarily prone to the strategic misrepresentation of preferences by an individual or a group. Moreover, we prove in this environment that for any nondictatorial institution, the truthful revelation of preferences can never be a dominant strategy equilibrium. Accordingly, an incentive to behave insincerely is inherent to the vast majority of real-world lawmaking systems, even when the policy space is unidimensional and the core is nonempty.T he question of manipulation-the misrepresentation of one's true preferences in order to achieve a more favorable collective decision-has alternately intrigued and frustrated social scientists for over two centuries. 1 Manipulation is clearly a potential problem for those interested in drawing inferences from individuals' observed behaviors. For example, how does a legislator's roll-call vote relate to his or her policy preferences? How does an individual voter's vote choice reflect his or her preferences over the parties and/or candidates? More subtly, does the composition of a legislative committee reflect the preferences of the members of the legislature?

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This article considers manipulation of collective choice — in such environments, a potential alternative is powerful only to the degree that its introduction can affect the collective decision. Using the Banks set (Banks, 1985), we present and characterize alternatives that can, and those that can not, affect sophisticated collective decision-making. Along with offering two substantive findings about political manipulation and a link between our results and Riker's concept of heresthetic, we define a new tournament solution concept that refines the Banks set, which we refer to as the heresthetically stable set.