One of the factors that affects how well any medication works is placebo. If someone takes a medication expecting, or at least being open to it working, statistically makes it is more likely to work. Now that is my interpretation of an aspect of placebo, which I don't know how much experimentation has been done to prove it out. My idea is if an inert pill of some sort can trigger a healing response in itself, in very roughly 20-30% of patients, combining an actual medication with placebo effect is likely to increase the positive effect of the medication.
A quick Google turned this up:
Cherry picking a few interesting quotes from it:
"Telling patients that they were being treated by an active medication doubled its effectiveness on a continuous measure of anxiety and tripled the response rate."
and, "Many depressed patients report substantial improvement after taking antidepressant medication, as do psychiatrists when describing their outcomes. How are we to reconcile this with the consistent finding that the differences between the response to antidepressants and placebos are vanishingly small? The answer is the placebo response. Although drug–placebo differences in outcome are equivalent to no difference at all, both drug and placebo responses can be substantial."
and, “a clinical response following treatment (
drug response) is not synonymous with an effect which can be attributed to the treatment (
drug effect)."
"Thus, the placebo effect was 50% of the drug response—double the drug effect and also double the response found in the no-treatment controls. It was a genuine placebo effect."
"Now placebos can also generate side effects, a phenomenon known as the nocebo effect, but they do so to a much lesser degree than active medications. "
"...placebos have been found effective to the condition being treated, that it has been found to involve Pavlovian conditioning, and that it might therefore be effective in treating the person’s condition."
"The long-term advantage of psychotherapy over medication has been shown in a number of studies [reviewed in Ref. (
)]. Whereas short-term outcomes were equivalent between the two treatments, long-term outcomes were significantly better for patients who had received psychotherapy than for those who had received medication. " --- So, if you do take anti-depressants, also get therapy!
So, OP's reference in the post title as whether they are bullshit led me to considering placebo. Placebo, according to this meta-study, looks to be a significant factor in response to anti-depressant treatment.
It's good to see that researchers are looking at how is it possible to maximize placebo response.
For individuals, if you take anti-depressant meds, be open to the meds working, yet avoid the "Lust For Results" that every magician is only too familiar with, as I suppose it likely has a negative impact here as well.
