I know I am going to receive criticism for this post, but I felt that I had to be done. There is extensive evidence that the “standard of care” treatment for depression – the so-called SSRI drugs – is no better than placebo while carrying a variety of very bad physiological side effects, not to mention the increase in violent and suicidal behavior those drugs are known to cause. The study below demonstrates that another pillar of mental disease treatment – talk therapy – likely works in more than 20% of the cases, and even then the magnitude of effects of probably small. This conclusion could easily be surmised by simply observing that despite ever-increasing rates of talk therapy for all age groups, the rates of mental disorders continue to skyrocket. All in all, it looks like talk therapy is little more than another cash-cow for the medical industry, and in the few cases where it truly works its effects can probably be easily and much more cheaply replicated by the patient simply having an honest conversation with a trusted and loved person. If one thing is certain, very few psychiatrists/psychologists are rated as trusted by their patients, and virtually none are loved. It never ceases to amaze me how conditioning of the public through manipulative mainstream media has managed to normalize not only sharing (and thus making available for profit-making) extremely private information with untrustworthy third parties, but that any attempt to question the effectiveness of professional psychological diabtribe are vehemently condemned by both practitioners and public health officials. Since it is now known that SSRI drugs were deliberately designed to keep the populace docile, servile and hierarchical, it is hard to believe that therapy (developed by the same commercial/medical/political interests that invented SSRI drugs) would have an effect any better than chemical “antidepressants”. The only question that remains, at least to me, is what side effects (if any) does talk therapy induce in the patient. In what percentage of patients does it make things worse?
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-43757-004
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-evidence-for-evidence-based-therapy-is-not-as-clear-as-we-thought
“…Around 20 per cent of ESTs performed well across a majority of our metrics (eg, problem-solving therapy for depression, interpersonal psychotherapy for bulimia nervosa, the aforementioned exposure therapy for specific phobias). This means not only that the therapies have been subjected to clinical trials, but that the evidence produced from these clinical trials seems credible and supports the claim that the EST will help people. We also found a ‘murky middle’: 30 per cent of ESTs had mixed results across metrics, performing neither consistently well nor poorly (eg, cognitive therapy for depression, interpersonal psychotherapy for binge-eating disorder). That leaves 50 per cent of ESTs with subpar outcomes across most of our metrics (eg, eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing for PTSD, interpersonal psychotherapy for depression). In other words, although these ESTs seemed to work based on the claims of the clinical trials cited by the Society of Clinical Psychology, we found the evidence from these trials lacked statistical credibility. For these ESTs, the relevant research results are sufficiently ambiguous that we cannot be sure that they really do work better than other forms of therapy.”
