I don't think the argument is "they don't work", moreso that they only work because the person thinks it will work and gets a placebo effect - not that the drug

I don't think the argument is "they don't work", moreso that they only work because the person thinks it will work and gets a placebo effect - not that the drug actually works to fix a chemical issue in the brain. Here's a couple things I found from searching "strength of placebo vs ssri": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK555852/table/ch4.tab29/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK555852/table/ch4.tab29... https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-1173-2 https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/185157 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/18515... The last one has a nice summary: > Antidepressant medications represent the best established treatment for major depressive disorder, but there is little evidence that they have a specific pharmacological effect relative to pill placebo for patients with less severe depression. Basically "they're the best tool we have but we don't have evidence that it actually has an effect". I remember a while ago I had a teacher that said "we laugh about rain dances today, but at the time there was a lot of evidence - you dance and you don't stop until it rains or you die, it's almost a 100% success rate". I feel like we see something similar here - we think what we're doing is helping but we don't have any causal evidence to support that. The evidence seems to suggest you could tell someone they're getting an SSRI, not give them any, and get the same outcome - suggesting the SSRI has little to no effect and what's actually causing the issue is something else, and could maybe be better addressed some other way. There's another famous story about "the anti-depressant cow" which seems very relevant here > https://antidepressantcow.org/2020/02/the-story-of-the-antidepressant-cow https://antidepressantcow.org/2020/02/the-story-of-the-antid... The TLDR is that a doctor tried to sell antidepressant meds in Cambodia and they basically told him "we don't need those - if someone is upset we get together as a community and make it better instead of trying to tell them it's their own problem to deal with"