Are modern anti-depressants merely placebos?

At Discover Magazine, psychologist Irving Kirsch argues that the current generation of anti-depressants don't really address specific chemical imbalances. He argues that they function at all because they are placebos:

[Current anti-depressants such as Prozac] all have different and in some cases opposite effects on brain chemistry, and yet they all show exactly the same response rate. It’s uncanny! That suggests it’s really the placebo effect that is helping the patients. In practice, all the different antidepressants have the same response rate. In a population of depressed people, they all work equally well. If they were actually correcting chemical imbalances, it would mean that the exact same number of people who are depressed have each kind of chemical imbalance: The proportion of people who have too much serotonin is exactly the same as the fraction who don’t have enough norepinephrine. The odds against that are astronomical.

I hope this makes it clear that I'm an equal opportunity skeptic. I don't merely pick on alternative, fringe and fraudulent treatments (e.g., homeopathy).

Continue ReadingAre modern anti-depressants merely placebos?

If you are taking the anti-depressants Prozac, Effexor, Paxil or Serzone, don’t read this post.

Are they gone?  Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone?  Good.  Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:

Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.

Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants?   After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect.  Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.”  Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.

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In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed.  In fact, Lilly makes this claim:

The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than

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Continue ReadingIf you are taking the anti-depressants Prozac, Effexor, Paxil or Serzone, don’t read this post.

Why don’t conservative Christians protest the use of legal mind-altering drugs?

I spent some time over at Focus on the Family, a site that teaches God's own version of morality, to see what they had to say about drug use.  As it turned out, the advice depended on whether the drug was illegal, as though God defers to the U.S. Congress…

Continue ReadingWhy don’t conservative Christians protest the use of legal mind-altering drugs?