Antidepressants and the Placebo Response

Abstract

I used to think that antidepressants worked. As a clinical psychologist, I had for years referred some of my clients to psychiatric colleagues who could prescribe antidepressants for them. Sometimes the antidepressants did not seem to help, but when they did, I assumed that the benefit derived from the chemical properties of the drug. In this chapter, I describe the process by which I came first to doubt and then to disbelieve the hypothesis that antidepressants had a biochemical affect on depression, a process more fully documented in The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (Kirsch, 2010).