Reply to Letter to the Editor "Should We Keep Calling Antidepressants Antidepressants?"

Letter to the Editor

Sir: Lara and Souza make an excellent point in their letter to the editor. There is no question that these "antidepressants" have effects in many nondepressive disorders, and we agree that it is time to begin to reclassify agents by their pharmacologic properties. This would indeed be more accurate pharmacologically, but to really make sense of our treatments, we need a deeper understanding of the biology of specific symptoms and disorders. Ultimately, we need to combine the specific pharmacologic effects of drugs with a much better biological description and classification of our patients. Hopefully, genetics will help inform a new classification system. When this occurs, a pharmacologic reclassification will be more informative both theoretically and practically.