Placebos

In an article titled Mind Over Meds in The New York Times, David Carlat, a psychiatrist, describes himself as a "psychopharmacologist" who specializes in "medication rather than psychotherapy."

"I realized, uncomfortably, that somehow, over the course of the decade following my residency, my way of thinking about patients had veered away from psychological curiosity. Instead, I had come to focus on symptoms, as if they were objective medical findings, much the way internists view blood-pressure readings or potassium levels. Psychiatry, for me and many of my colleagues, had become a process of corralling patients’ symptoms into labels and finding a drug to match.

"A result is that psychiatry has been transformed from a profession in which we talk to people and help them understand their problems into one in which we diagnose disorders and medicate them."

Carlat goes on to document the efficacy of SSRI drugs like Prozac and Paxil versus placebos in the treatment of depression.

"Research studies have shown that therapy is just as effective as medications for many conditions, and that medications themselves often work through the power of placebo. In one study, for example, researchers did a meta-analysis of studies submitted by drug companies to the F.D.A. on seven new antidepressants, involving more than 19,000 patients. It turned out that antidepressants are, indeed, effective, because on average patients taking the pills showed a 40 percent drop in depression scores. But placebo was also a powerful antidepressant, causing a 30 percent drop in depression scores. This meant that about three-quarters of the apparent response to antidepressants pills is actually due to the placebo effect."

See previous posts Head Games and DSM IV about the complicity of the American Psychiatric Association, Big Pharma and medical insurers and how they conspire to treat symptoms directly with quick diagnoses and pills instead of understanding patients and trying to resolve the underlying root causes.