The evidence is really really weak.

The found no coorolation between antidepressant consumption and antibiotic resistance in a population study which means even if there is an in vitro effect, it's so far not translating into real world effects.

>After reading the article, González Zorn decided to check if there was any correlation between the different levels of consumption of antidepressants in European Union countries and levels of antibiotic resistance, but found none. 

And then they throw in this little nugget to somehow try and pull it back.

>Such a correlation, however, does exists when other factors are taken into consideration, such as the number of drugs consumed without prescription.

This isn't even even relevant to the article at hand. It also doesn't take into account other drugs either because that's not what they're testing. They were looking at anti-depressants and the results came up negative.

The mechanism they suggest is just general stress response which leads increased mutations and horizontal gene transfer (more on this later).

They did in vitro studies and found the inhibitory concentrations of various antibiotics increased. The above mechanism can't explain this because this would require either de novo resistance mechanisms to just evolve in the short timeframe (incredibly unlikely), and presumably they didn't have resistance genes in the bacteria (which eliminates horizontal gene transfer) since you'd just end up selecting for those with the resistance marker.

Basically they found that antidepressants activate bacterial stress responses. Bacterial stress responses are known to increase antibiotic resistance. But when they looked to the real world, there was no effect.

In short, anti depressants activate bacterial stress pathways. There is no evidence for it causing an increase in antibiotic resistance in individuals taking anti depressants.

>Now, it would be necessary to see if the same results that have been seen [in cell cultures] can be reproduced in vivo, in animal models, and see other effects, such as what happens with the microbiome.”

That was looked at previously. That's what coorilation study was looking at. They found no signal. So this suggests it's not a problem.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't study this, only that so far the best evidence we have says it's not actually causing an increase in resistance, even though the in vitro study says it's possible.

This is a really crappy article because right now the best evidence suggests that antidepressants are not causing an increase in antibiotic resistance.