The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth PDF

Rating: Author: Irving Kirsch ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

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Do antidepressants work? Of course—everyone knows it. Like his colleagues, Irving Kirsch, a researcher and clinical psychologist, for years referred patients to psychiatrists to have their depression treated with drugs before deciding to investigate for himself just how effective the drugs actually were. Over the course of the past fifteen years, however, Kirsch’s research—a thorough analysis of decades of Food and Drug Administration data—has demonstrated that what everyone knew about antidepressants was wrong. Instead of treating depression with drugs, we’ve been treating it with suggestion.

The Emperor’s New Drugs makes an overwhelming case that what had seemed a cornerstone of psychiatric treatment is little more than a faulty consensus. But Kirsch does more than just criticize: he offers a path society can follow so that we stop popping pills and start proper treatment for depression.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 451 KB
• Print Length: 242 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 046502016X
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (January 26, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0035YDM6C
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #201,020 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #19 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Psychopharmacology
• #19 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Psychopharmacology

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth PDF

I have conflicts of interest to declare. I'm a physician but I also write. I share a publisher (Random House UK) with Irving Kirsch and have written for them about the damage done by doctors who don't subject their ideas to reliable tests. Because of this I was asked if I'd provide a recommendation to go on the dust jacket of Kirsch's book. I was familiar with his work, having read his medical journal articles analysing the evidence behind antidepressant tablets. On that basis I sat down to his book expecting that I'd probably be able to say something nice about it. I thought it'd most likely amount to saying that Kirsch's research is important and interesting and should be mandatory for doctors involved with antidepressant prescriptions.

This book, though, isn't worthy & technical - it's fascinating. It's a remarkably readable account of how we got carried away with an idea about the brain that isn't true. You don't need to have an interest in depression and you don't have to be a medic; this is a thoughtful look at how bright & well-meaning people get enchanted with an idea & go on to fool themselves and everyone else. It isn't a doctor-bashing book, nor one that pushes the author's own pet therapy. Instead it gives a lovely insight into the way science works, and the way it can sometimes gets done so badly that it doesn't work at all. Kirsch argues antidepressant tablets are based on a false pharmacological model of the brain, and that the balance of evidence shows they don't work except as placebos. Even if you're not persuaded by Kirsch's thesis - and I think you should be - you'll find his ideas thought-provoking.

For most of human history, going to see a doctor was a bad move. We did more harm than good.

I've often felt that there should be an Anti-Nobel Prize for Medicine. This would be given not for discovering something new, but for discovering that something we believed deeply wasn't true. If there were such an award, Irving Kirsch would be up for it.

We have known some fundamentals about depression for decades: It is caused by a biochemical imbalance, the imbalance is in the serotonergic system, antidepressant drugs targeting this system somehow correct the problem, and they do so safely and with an excellent risk to benefit ratio. As the data have accumulated, however, the elegance and sense of these ideas have given way to confusion. In terms of Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts, the evidence is tilting us uncomfortably from a belief in the origins, nature, and pharmacological treatment of clinical depression, toward a period of confusion where the older ideas collapse but have yet to be replaced by a newer model.

Few have done more elegant and powerful work in this area than Kirsch. As a psychologist specializing in depression, I have followed his articles closely since his work on this topic began coming out over ten years ago. As you read the book, you can begin to get a small chirping annoyance that takes a while to find its way into awareness. With all due respect to Kirsch: "This seems like good work, but it's not exactly rocket science. It's a bit obvious to go back and look at all the data to see what has actually been done, which of it has been published, and what it actually shows in terms of effectiveness. How is it that no one did this before?" You are led to two possibilities: Either people connected with the work see the problems and ignore them, or the quality of the science in this field is pretty low.