Placebo Vs Antidepressant

Words: 292
Pages: 2

A study was done in 2008 by Irving Kirsch that forefronted the research on the idea that antidepressants were ineffective. He was sceptical of the drug and hypothesized that a patient's mind (mind over matter) played the role in making them feel better rather than the medicine itself. Kirsch conducted an experiment where he did forty-seven trials of comparing patients that he gave a placebo to versus an antidepressant. The subjects did not know whether the were given the actual drug or the placebo. His findings confirmed that not only did the experiment show a miniscule difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo effects in patients with moderate depression, but overall the effect of the antidepressants was below the recommended