Too busy to read?

Some people said to Irving--so what? Okay, so say it's a placebo effect. Whatever the reason, people still feel better. Why break the spell? He explained: the evidence from the clinical trials suggests that the antidepressant effects are a largely a placebo, but the side effects are mostly the result of the chemicals themselves, and they can be very severe.

My contention is that placebos need to be slightly absurd to work.fn1 All three elements that seem to make Red Bull such a potent mental hackfn2 make no sense from a logical point of view. People want cheap, abundant and nice-tasting drinks, surely? And yet the success of Red Bull proves that they don't. Something about these three illogicalities may well be essential to its unconscious appeal, or to its potency as a placebo. If we are to subconsciously believe that a drink has medicinal or psychotropic powers, perhaps it can't taste conventionally nice. Imagine a doctor saying, 'I have some pills here to treat your extremely aggressive cancer - take as many as you like. Now, would you like them in strawberry or blackcurrant flavour?' Somehow, that last sentence doesn't quite work.

A short while later, Irving was handed another leaked study. This one struck me especially hard when I read about it, because it was talking directly about a situation I had been in. Not long before I started taking Seroxat (also marketed as Paxil), the drug's manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline, had secretly conducted three clinical trials into whether Seroxat should be given to teenagers like me. One study discovered the placebo worked better; one study showed no difference between the drug and placebo; and one study showed mixed results. None showed a success. Yet, in a partial publication of the results, they announced: "Paroxetine [another name for the drug] is effective for major depression in adolescents."