The Emperor's New Drugs
First edition, 2009
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| Author | Irving Kirsch |
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| Subject | The efficacy of antidepressants |
| Publisher | The Bodley Head |
| Pages | 226 |
| ISBN | |
The Emperor's New Drugs – Exploding the Antidepressant Myth is a 2009 book by Irving Kirsch, arguing that the chemical imbalance theory of depression is wrong and that antidepressants have little or no direct effect on depression but, because of their common serious side-effects, they are a powerful placebo.
Kirsch is Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies and a lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and professor emeritus of psychology at the Universities of Hull and Plymouth in the United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut in the United States. His research interests include placebo effects, antidepressants, expectancy, and hypnosis. He is the originator of response expectancy theory.
While analyzing antidepressant trials as part of his research into the placebo effect, Kirsch realised that drug companies do not publish all of their disappointing antidepressant trial results, but most decisions about the efficacy of an antidepressant are based only on published results. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he and his colleagues acquired from the US Food and Drug Administration the unpublished trial results for six antidepressants. When the results from both published and unpublished studies were averaged, the researchers concluded that the drugs produced a small but clinically meaningless improvement in mood compared with an inert placebo (sugar pill). (Some researchers have questioned the statistical basis of this study suggesting that it underestimates the effect size of antidepressants and other studies have reached a range of supporting and conflicting conclusions).
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