I don't think a good psychiatrist/therapist would ever make the bold claim that pills alone can cure depression.

The pills are not the problem. It's the fact that the bulk of all the anti-depressants taken, are being proscribed by doctors who're not specialised in the field of psychiatric or psychological disorders.

Therefore, people often get proscriptions that are not a good fit for their particular problem, and they don't get the help they need.
And to make it all worse, people don't get the proper information about the stuff they get proscribed.

Anti-depressants don't work immediately. Often it takes a week or two, or even longer, for the effacts to kick in. Side-effects are the worst, during this two week period, and then slowly dissapate. But if people don't know this, they experience terrible side-effects without having the feeling that there's any improvement going on. As a result, they only feel worse.

The combination of therapy of some sort, AND pills, has proven (statistically) to be the most effective treatment against depression. The pills are only meant to get you out of bed, and up and running again, so that you can work on the problems yourself. Preferably with the help of a good therapist.

This requires specialist, not generalist doctors.
The generalists simply don't know how to cure depression. They think giving someone a heavily marketed pill will cure a patient, because that's what the brochure says it will do.

I realy think it's these generalists, who don't have the expertise nor the time to realy figure out what's going on with their patients, who have given these pills such a bad name. The same story could probably said about painkillers like oxycodone.
Pain realy has become a specialism, over the last couple of years. If more people would be sent to those specialists, the addiction problem would not be as big as it is now. I'm sure of that.

This. General practitioners prescribing (is it 'proscribed' with an O in the UK?) psych meds is a huge unaddressed problem here. Not just anti depressants but benzos and amphetamines to teenage boys for being teenage boys and benzos and tranquilizers to their parents after having a row. The state of the industry is sad, as long as our health is profit motivated though...

No, i just suck at english.

It is interesting to note, that antidepressants have been getting more and more effective. But possibly not because there are more efficacious drugs on the market, but because people trust them more. Pills, afterall, stand for cure like nothing else in our cultures. There is definatly a general therapeutic effect ("placebo" getting a colorful, "magic" pill from some academic in a white robe.

'Proscribed' means forbidden. Just for the record.