Psych Drugs as the "emperor's new clothes"

As seen in the Sydney Morning Herald

Anti-depressant medications may be a case of the "emperor's new clothes", according to studies that show that, in banishing the blues, drugs are only marginally better than a sugar pill. Debate about the value of anti-depressants has spilled into the latest issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP), which highlights a recent US survey of the results of 19 anti-depressant drug trials. The analysis found that placebos duplicated 80 per cent of the effects of anti-depressants.

"In this analogy, psychiatry is the emperor, drug trials are the fraudsters," according to the BJP.

"The deception is being revealed by a growing body of critical opinion proposing that ... anti-depressants either don't work at all or have an effect that is so small as to be clinically unimportant."

Psychiatrists are defending themselves by saying that just because they are ineffective doesn't mean they don't work.

let's try that again ...