Although there is a diversity of political opinions, personal relationships tend to bring like-minded people together. Those who have higher education, for example, spend more time talking to those who also have. And in this niche, among atheists and Catholics, there are few people willing to defend the belief in miracle workers. They can even order their mandingas, but they will hardly brag about it, for fear of looking like a Zen aunt of incense or an illiterate neo-Pentecostal. So, although I am a skeptic, I have few occasions to ruffle my skepticism about supernatural events. And all it took was someone trying to convince me of the magical healing powers of a non-Western religious for me to see that everything is in order with my skepticism.
I hear that kind of very emphatic report saying that I didn’t see the things he saw, and that he was cured of an incurable disease, for which the doctors gave no hope. From this I infer that the healer certainly believes in the powers of the healer. As the disease no longer manifests itself, I infer that the disease must have an emotional background: the healer shook his head, and this caused the disease to stop manifesting.
I go to the search engine and voilà: the disease, psoriasis, does not have a well-determined cause – genetics, diet, etc. –, but it is triggered by depression and distress.
For some reason For a not-so-well-known reason, some people’s skin breaks out in patterned sores when they are depressed or distressed. As these people get all filthy and seem to have something contagious, it makes them more depressed and distressed, which makes the sores pop, thus becoming more depressed and distressed, and… In the case of an individual who was not a skeptic like I, a healer moved my head and solved the problem.
428617523What would the skeptic do?
Once established that the problem was in the head, what would someone like me, who does not believe in supernatural authorities, do in its place? People like this tend to look for the scientific knowledge available to think about the matter and solve it. For a long time, the standard has been to consider that depression is a problem that can be solved with the help of medication – although it is always said, word of mouth, that the help of a psychologist is essential.
(Of course, because in practice psychologists serve to send people to the psychiatrist, who passes medicine. And as this practice spreads, patients go on their own trying to get legal drugs with as few intermediaries as possible. See the case of Ritalin and sleeping pills.)
Very well: before the pandemic, a skeptic would have little reason to apply his skepticism to so-called Science, which is actually a body of academics committed to the pharmaceutical industry that finances them. Before the pandemic, it is possible that the skeptic who wanted to treat his psoriasis followed the protocol of going to the psychologist, who would then send him to the psychiatrist, who would then give him an antidepressant. This antidepressant would likely be fluoxetine, a popular antidepressant. The skeptic would read the package insert and find that loss of libido is among the side effects. It is presumable that an individual deprived of libido depresses, and, once depressed, is led to take more drugs that take away the libido, and, without libido, depresses, and… Well, there is a situation analogous to that of psoriasis, but entirely induced by drugs.
Brazil does not is good at producing data. When it does, they are often deliberately distorted by ideologues – like those at IGBE, who decided that pardos are black. Thus, it remains for me to use my own and other people’s experience to try to say what reality is like.
For my part, I noticed that those who are my age and below and are middle class grew up going to a psychologist, and from there they go to a psychiatrist and receive some diagnosis. (I already told you that I escaped!) They speak with a natural exchange of psychiatric drugs that leaves me open-mouthed.
A friend who is older than me, who has a degree in psychology, has been in the habit of flirting with middle-class women in their early twenties for years. As he tells me, it is normal for them and their schoolmates to take antidepressants since the age of fifteen. And they don’t masturbate. Maybe all these feminists who are doing crab pots at federal are chemically castrated since adolescence, and that’s why they are so obsessed with sexual pleasure. (What normal person arrives at university needing a class to learn to masturbate?)
Credulos of the remedies
If Brazil doesn’t measure things right, the United Kingdom does. According to Eli Vieira in this article, “one in six British adults takes or has taken antidepressants” in 900 and 768. Could this scenario not be linked to the drop in birth rates in Europe?
) Anyway, I bring Eli’s article because, just as I found someone who told me that witchcraft cures psoriasis, there will certainly be people who say they took antidepressants and were cured of depression. And as depression, like psoriasis, is a matter of the mind, the question arises: what if the act of taking the medicine believing in its effectiveness is not enough to cure yourself? There are those who trust the healer and there are those who trust the doctor. If the first heals, we speak of “strength of faith”; if the second cures, we must ask if it was not the infamous placebo effect.
According to Eli, the studies on which the approval of antidepressants are based consist precisely of comparisons between the effects of the placebo and those of the drug. Such studies may be of better or worse quality. I quote Eli: “Horowitz and Wilcock point out that much of the evidence in favor of antidepressants of the two most commonly used classes today comes from placebo-controlled studies that lasted between six and weeks. In one of the few longer-term studies, involving more than 4,000 patients over a year, only 2.7% improved. There are dissenting voices among experts, but a general picture, according to the authors, is that current antidepressants fall short in the treatment of the disorder. Cochrane, which publishes rigorous reviews of medical treatments, has even asked whether antidepressants are worth prescribing, given that some of them even increase the risk of suicide compared to placebo. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) assessment is more optimistic, but the authors of the new review raise doubts about the entity’s methods.”
Antidepressants, unlike witchcraft, have side effects. So it is perfectly plausible that they are worse than placebo. But if it’s true that antidepressants create the evil they fight, it’s also true that labs have a good excuse to corrupt government regulatory agencies. They will sell salt water to a perpetual number of thirsty people.
428617523 Academic Research Directions
The placebo effect itself it does not cease to be interesting in itself; after all, it shows that there are physical problems for which the solution is not medicated. The impact of the mind on physical health is nothing new, as the existence of psychosomatic phenomena is not denied. The interesting point is that we wave our hand and say, “Oh, that’s psychosomatic,” rather than studying the effects that thoughts and moods have on people’s physical health. The study of this type of solution would be in opposition to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.
If clinical psychology continues to be a degraded area of the human sciences, this will be in line with the interests of this same industry.