Something interesting is that numerous studies have shown that a number of psychotropics, including the monstrosity that's fluoxetine/prozac, perform at levels

Something interesting is that numerous studies have shown that a number of psychotropics, including the monstrosity that's fluoxetine/prozac, perform at levels that is hardly better than placebo. In many cases the difference is not statistically significant. This [1] paper/article provides an overview of a variety of data. It also goes into how these sort of drugs manage to get approved in spite of negligible performance. The paper gives the example of vilazodone/viibryd. That drug went through 5 trials. They showed absolutely 0 effect. In some of the trials the placebo outperformed the drug. Undeterred, the company continued running trials. In the next two they managed to show a very small effect, probably similarly to how if you flip a fair coin enough eventually you'll get heads 10 times in a row 'proving' the coin isn't fair. Anyhow those two trials showing a minuscule effect were enough for the FDA which now states, "The efficacy of VIIBRYD was established in two 8-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.". I find this just completely fascinating. That prozac shows a negligible effect over placebo in blind studies is even more interesting to me because of the side effects. It has some really serious side effects - you'd know if you were getting the 'real' stuff, at least if you were allowed to communicate with the others who were. And the prozac brand alone was, at its peak, reaching profits of $2.6 billion a year. This creates a nasty incentive for pharmaceutical companies to target 'drugs' at conditions that can be treated by placebo. Because in these cases, you can always prove the drug works, without actually having to go through all that nasty work involved in creating a drug that actually works. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/