The trouble is that the placebo effect has been repeatedly demonstrated to be extremely, profoundly strong for depression and anxiety treatments. Yes research

The trouble is that the placebo effect has been repeatedly demonstrated to be extremely, profoundly strong for depression and anxiety treatments. Yes research has found improvements when you put people on SSRIs, but double blind placebo controlled studies generally find that about 80% of the benefits also occur in the placebo group, so the actual benefit over placebo is only about 2 points on the HAM-D scale. [1] On top of that, SSRIs have well-known side effects that are pretty noticeable for most people, so it’s hard to know how much of their benefit vs placebo is due to loss of blinding and/or the “active placebo” effect. It is, however, notable that one study found a loss of effect when subjects were deceived and told that the SSRI they were given was an active placebo with similar side effects to an SSRI, and the differences were visible on brain scans, not just in their subjective reports.[2] [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01682-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01682-3