Tag: placebo

Researchers argue that we need a paradigm shift away from the biomedical model of mental illness to one informed by political action and common sense.

The promotion of SSRI antidepressant use began with the pharmaceutical industry and occurs despite evidence that these drugs are harmful, not helpful, in children and adolescents.

An interview with John Read and Irving Kirsch to discuss their paper which calls to prohibit ECT. This is because the negative effects of ECT are so strong, the evidence supporting it is so weak (especially in the long-term and beyond the improvement due to placebo) and there are other means of addressing the difficulties that the person is struggling with.

With these twelve facts, you are equipped to defend against the misinformation propagated by academic psychiatry, Big Pharma, and the laypeople they target. You are encouraged to use this knowledge to (firmly but respectfully) challenge statements you hear in passing or from loved-ones such as “He is mentally ill,” “I have a chemical imbalance and these drugs help correct it,” or any other commonly accepted falsehoods that the above facts expose.

A new review of antipsychotic trials conducted over the last 24 years finds that the placebo response rate is steadily increasing, and drug response is decreasing.

A new article documents the “flimsy evidence” behind the recent FDA approval of the party drug esketamine for the treatment of depression.

Clinical trials also consistently fail to measure and report long-term harmful effects.

A new review, published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, concludes that antidepressants should not be used as the risks outweigh evidence for benefits.

A new study investigated whether participants guessing if they have an antidepressant or placebo affects response rates.

An interview with Professor Jim van Os who says that, arguably, ‘love is the most powerful evidence-based treatment in mental health’. We discuss his recent paper published in World Psychiatry which envisions a future for mental health that moves away from symptoms and diagnoses and towards peer support and lived experience.

When people waste all their time and effort on futile attempts to fix fake chemical imbalances instead of addressing their real issues (since there supposedly are none), their issues will persist and build up. Hyping placebos to be miracle pills thus builds up false hopes, which sets a person up for big letdowns that can lead to suicide.

In this interview for Vox, Ted Kaptchuk discusses his research on the effectiveness of giving open-label placebos - sugar pills that the doctors admit are...

An article published this month in the journal BMC Psychiatry suggests that there is a lack of efficacy for SSRIs and that they significantly increase the risk of serious side effects.

A new study finds that individuals being treated with open-label placebos showed significant reductions in pain and disability, even when compared to individuals receiving treatment as usual.

In this Shouts & Murmurs video from the New Yorker placebo pills get the full drug advertisement treatment. Video → Watch this video on The Scene.

For the New York Times, Cornell psychiatrist Richard Friedman proposes new regulations to make direct-to-consumer drug ads reveal the relative price and effectiveness information that...

Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a cognitive-behavioral defect. For some of these people, it feels better to believe that they are essentially defective. But the “defect/medical model of mental illness” is counterproductive for many other people—especially those “untalented” in denial and self-deception—for whom there is another model and path that works much better.

There is an enormous irony in a psychiatrist using the epithet "thought police" to express censure, when it is psychiatry itself that routinely incarcerates and forcibly drugs and shocks people on the grounds that their thoughts and speech don't conform to psychiatry's standards of normality.

While publication bias has been known to overestimate the efficacy of antidepressant treatments, a new study suggests that research on the use of psychotherapy in depression suffers from a similar bias.

I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.

Irving Kirsch (the psychologist who has argued that antidepressants offer a marginal advantage over placebos) has agreement from an unlikely source- advertisements from a pharmaceutical company, which agree completely...

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has posted a response to the 60 minutes segment on Irving Kirsch and the placebo effect in antidepressant research. But is their response based on scientific data?