Pim Cuijpers

The MAHA report (Making America Healthy Again) claims that psychotherapy is more effective than medication in children and adolescents, and they refer to a paper of which I was the first author. But this paper does not say anything about these treatments in children and adolescents, only about adults. Treatments of depression in adolescents have a different efficacy than treatments in adults, so they cannot be compared and this reference is therefore not useable in adolescents. It also fails to state that the combination of therapy and antidepressants is superior to therapy or antidepressants alone. In adolescents there is no evidence that psychotherapy is more effective than antidepressants, but there is clear evidence that combined treatment is more effective than therapy or antidepressants alone. We have shown that in another meta-analysis (Zhou et al., 2020).

I am not in favor of extended use of antidepressants in youth, but if you want to make that point you should use evidence for that and correct references.

Read more about this wrong citation at:

https://www.notus.org/health-science/maha-report-update-citation-errors