The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

My first awareness of Dr. Kirsch was on a DVD called Placebo: Mind Over Medicine?, where he participated in a segment regarding antidepressants. It's available from Films for the Humanities and Sciences. It's a real eye opener with respect to the placebo effect! Both informative and entertaining, The Emperor's New Drugs tell a chilling tale of Big Pharma, Inc, and the machinery that brings to market the drugs that are the mainstay of modern medicine. While we have many life enhancing drugs available to us, the history of antidepressants is both revealing and disturbing. It appears that the creation and propagation of antidepressants is less about science's quest to treat a debilitating condition, and more about profits made at the expense of the uninformed consumer. Kirsch doesn't argue that antidepressants don't work, but reveals that the reason they work is largely the result of the placebo effect. In other words, what makes them effective is our belief in them, not the active ingredient in the pills themselves. Maybe it's time for placebo pills to make a come back from the early days of medicine, where the active ingredient is belief, and there are no dangerous side effects. If patients understood how to leverage the power of beliefs to trigger the self-healing response, modern medicine would take a giant leap forward, and patients could take a more active role in their own healing process. In addition to the research about antidepressants, I believe the most important message in Kirsch's book to clinicians and lay people alike, is that our beliefs can powerfully affect our health and general wellbeing. When will modern medicine stop trying to factor the placebo effect out of the equation for health, and start figuring out how to leverage the mind as medicine? The honest answer is, the day the placebo effect can be bottled and sold commercially. Sad, but probably true. It seems that the use of the mind as medicine will be left to mind/body researchers who are willing to look beyond the current medical model.