… an “explosive” segment on anti-depressants as no better than placebos for the vast majority of people taking them? Will it be, as promised, explosive? Harvard’s Irving Kirsch will talk about his research, featured in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth – another promised explosion. Marcia Angell’s review of his and other books on the subject in the New York Review of Books was also, I guess, explosive… But so far that essay prompted only a flaccid little response from Peter Kramer in the New York Times.
We’ve heard nothing from the companies that make billions of dollars off the sale of do-nothing, stuffed-with-side-effects drugs except for what they told Stahl: They work. Kramer said the same thing: “[I]t is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They’re not.”
Dangerous!
But why are Kramer and company doing little other than repeating, while speaking darkly of risk, that antidepressants work?
Et alors. I’m not sure major attention even of the sort 60 Minutes represents will constitute a bombshell. Positions here are and have long been entrenched, and you don’t exactly kiss goodbye a ten billion dollar enterprise without a struggle.
And millions of Americans – despite witnessing an extremely loud and incredibly close prescription pill epidemic – seem wedded to a sense of themselves as chemically dependent. Indeed to a sense of life itself as the sort of thing you need Prozac to pursue.
February 19th, 2012 at 2:36PM
[…] “Millions of Americans – despite witnessing an extremely loud and incredibly close prescription pil….” […]
February 19th, 2012 at 9:47PM
while I welcome this coverage did they mention side-effects once?
February 19th, 2012 at 10:15PM
I always thought they should do placebo surgery. They put you under, make some stitches, and charge you $8000.
February 20th, 2012 at 12:14AM
Even better: Psychic surgery.
February 21st, 2012 at 5:10PM
Hey! Placebo surgery is real!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley
Scroll down to the section “Goat gland transplantation.”
Brinkley wasn’t born here in Texas, but he apparently got here as soon as he could and more or less created border radio.
A genuine American character. You can’t make this stuff up.