Psychologist Says Antidepressants Are Just Fancy Placebos

Psychologist Says Antidepressants Are Just Fancy Placebos: "Depression is a chemical imbalance, most people think. Researchers, drug manufacturers, and even the Food and Drug Administration assert that antidepressants work by “normalizing” levels of brain neurotransmitters—chemical messengers such as serotonin. And yet hard science supporting this idea is quite poor, says Irving Kirsch, professor of psychology at the University of Hull in the U.K. An expert on the placebo effect, Kirsch has unearthed evidence that antidepressants do not correct brain chemistry gone awry. More important, the drugs are not much more effective against depression than are sugar pills, he says. To support these controversial claims, Kirsch conducted a meta-analysis, digging up data from unpublished clinical trials. When all the evidence is weighed together, Prozac, Paxil, and other such popular pills seem to be at best weakly effective against depression—an argument Kirsch presses in his new book, The Emperor’s New Drugs. Other research backs up his claims. A study published this winter in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that psychoactive drugs are no better than placebos for people suffering from mild to moderate depression.

As for the studies that do find effectiveness in antidepressants, Kirsch says that's merely the placebo effect sneaking its way in: 'When you do a clinical trial, you tell people that they might get a placebo. When researchers give placebos, what they are trying to control for is the expectancy of improvement, which can produce a sense of hope. You also tell them that the active drug causes side effects and what those side effects are. If I were a patient in one of these trials, I’d be wondering, well, what am I getting? And if I’ve started noticing side effects, and especially the side effects that had been described to me, I would no longer be 'blind.' I would think, 'Oh, my mouth is dry, that’s great—that means I got the active drug.' That would further increase my expectation that the drug was going to help. In the few studies where that has been assessed, about 
80 percent of patients do figure out what group they are in. So it’s actually the side effects, the undesirable chemical effects of these drugs, that cause subjects on antidepressants to do a little better than those on the placebo.'"