Cassandra Fournet’s Reviews > The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth > Status Update

They also have a hypothesis that the worse the depression, the lower the placebo effect goes down (because these people have probably tried multiple medications before already without success, so don’t have that hope) - so they are given higher dosages and improve, further correlating worse side effects with better placebo outcome.

Now in their study they have given people active placebos, so that they will still receive some side effects so they don’t “break blind” - those people got even better, not from the drug effect, but because more side effects correlated with the placebo of these drugs working harder. The rougher the side effects the better they “heal” from depression.

They teach how double blind tests work — the doctor doesn’t know who has the drug or the patient.

They also found that most doctors and patients “break blind” before they are told which they received meaning based on side effects they are able to guess before testing ends. This gives a boosted placebo effect to those with the drug - which takes away even more of that “drug benefit” percentage.

This doctor is trying to prove his hypothesis that the benefit most people receive from antidepressant drugs is purely placebo.

In fact, when he did his study there wasn’t too much of a jump from those who had taken the placebo and those that had been given the drug.

Theres about a 25% difference which in the drug world and with the bad side effects that come with these drugs, the benefit isn’t that much