Posted by mikes on April 16, 2001, at 13:06:54
I'm not sure how much this has been discussed already on this board or around the net, but I wanted to bring it up. What do you think the actual level of efficacy for antidepressant medications is? I personally think it is quite low. Once you subtract the placebo percentage from the medication percentage (70-30, approximately) you get 40 percent. Maybe half of those people are responding to the real medication because of the side effects, which boosted the placebo effect. So a rough estimate is that 20 percent of people will respond to any one medication (by actual pharmacological mechanisms), if that.
I think many of the people on this board are those who would not respond to a placebo, and that is why they have tried so many different medications. I personally do not respond to placebos because my depression has lasted for as long as I can remember, and is fairly severe. St. John's Wort worked very well for a little while. Being stoned does too, however, I prefer not to be in that state during the day. I had a very bad reaction to paxil, and I haven't felt anything from zoloft after two weeks (I used marijuana once after the first week, I'm not sure if this would kill the efficacy).
It really annoys me that so few studies have been done on active placebos (placebos that produce side effects) in comparison to antidepressants. Why do psychiatrists say that antidepressants are very effective, when in reality most of the users are cured of their depression by placebo effect? What about the rest of us who don't respond? We just get screwed over? I guess so.
poster:mikes
thread:60081
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010411/msgs/60081.html