Tag: antidepressants and placebo

Experts advocate limiting antidepressant use to only the most severe cases of depression, emphasizing the need for social and psychological interventions.

World Psychiatry article challenges conventional antidepressant prescription practices.

Meta-analysis finds that the placebo run-in methodology reduces the placebo effect and finds antidepressants to be less useful.

Studies that compare the effectiveness of different antidepressant drugs are unreliable, according to new research in BMC Psychiatry.

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.

Researchers suggest that because most antidepressant “success” is due to the placebo effect, they may never find a way to predict outcomes.

Dr. Madhukar Trivedi and colleagues find that the SSRI sertraline does not reduce depressive symptoms any more than placebo in people with Chronic Kidney Disease.

Dr Irving Kirsch is Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies and lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He joins us this week to discuss his research into the placebo effect and what it tells us about the efficacy of antidepressant drugs.

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.

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.

Recent meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have revealed that up to 82% of the effects associated with the drugs may be attributed to placebo and non-medication factors. A new study examined the attitudes of psychiatrists toward these non-pharmacologic factors and found a large discrepancy between their beliefs and the empirical evidence.

Acknowledging that current depression treatments are failing many people, researchers from Michigan State and MIT have developed a new model for understanding how multiple psychological, biological, social and environmental factors contribute to depression.