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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Interesting, but I don't think this quite explains why two antidepressants with equivalent side effect profiles can have dramatically different effects. For example, imipramine is considered the gold standard tricyclic for melancholic depression -- which is consistent with your hypothesis, since imipramine has a larger side effect profile than the newer SSRIs. But, for atypical depression, imipramine has no effect, while the SSRIs are often helpful, and even more helpful are the MAOIs (which again have large side effect profiles so this is somewhat consistent with your hypothesis).

In any event, I think it is overly simplistic to reduce the effects of these drugs to an especially strong placebo effect.

There is one more possibility. Certain drugs increase the placebo effect. For example, when you secretly inject proglumide, there is no effect. But, when you visibly inject proglumide, it has a much larger analgesic effect than saline. As proglumide does not have any significant side effects, and as this effect exists even when no side effects are reported, I think it provides evidence that certain drugs interact biologically (rather than psychologically) with the placebo effect.

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Ronfar's avatar

Incidentally, Adderall is basically made of amphetamines...

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