Placebo Talks

This volume provides various perspectives on how psychosocial parameters - such as interpersonal rapport, historical and contemporary context, corporate memory, expectation, empathy, hope, conditioning, symbolic thinking and suggestion - play a role in forming placebo responses and placebo effects.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.

This volume provides various perspectives on how psychosocial parameters - such as interpersonal rapport, historical and contemporary context, corporate memory, expectation, empathy, hope, conditioning, symbolic thinking and suggestion - play a role in forming placebo responses and placebo effects.

Psychoanalysis has had to defend itself from a barrage of criticism throughout its history. Nevertheless, there are many who claim to have been helped by this therapy, and who claim to have achieved genuine insight into their condition. But do the psychodynamic or exploratory psychotherapies - the so-called talking cures - really help clients get in touch with their "inner", "real" or "true" selves? Do clients make important discoveries about the real causes of their behaviours, emotions, and personalities? Are their insights, and the psychodynamic interpretations offered them by their psychotherapists, true? Many think so. Talking Cures and Placebo Effects contests this view. It defends the unpopular hypothesis that therapeutic changes in the psychodynamic psychotherapies are sometimes functions of powerful placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers in much the same way that placebo pills rally the body's native healing powers; and that psychodynamic insights and interpretations are themselves placebos. Few clients know this, and fewer still are informed of the potential placebo effects at play in exploratory psychotherapy, and of the consequent risks of self-misinterpretation and self-deception. Thus does Talking Cures and Placebo Effects target a host of problems that lie at the very intersection of the epistemology, ethics, scientific status, and public accountability of the talking cures.

"This book provides the most up-to-date overview of the nature, measurement, and ethics surrounding placebos. In addition to summarizing research on the placebo effect, the authors advocates for incorporation of the placebo effect in clinical practice and scientific studies"--

This book provides a perspective on the concepts placebo and placebo effects, which has been missing so far: a detailed analysis of the history of the terms, their current use, suggested alternatives and the implications of the conceptual confusion. Everybody knows something about placebos and placebo effects. If, however, people are asked to define the concepts, the spectrum becomes wide. Does 'placebo' refer to an inert treatment or does it cover all elements of the patient-physician-interaction except for pharmacological or other physiological mechanisms? Furthermore, if, by definition, a placebo has no effect, what sense does it make to talk about a 'placebo effect'? Even in scientific literature the concepts ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’ are used in many senses and often in a confusing way. While this book discusses many issues which keep puzzling physicians, it also covers the historical developments of the concepts of placebo and placebo effect as well as the conceptual confusion in the definitions. This book is intended for physicians, philosophers, psychologists and any other people interested in placebos, placebo effects and the physician-patient relationship.

Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell? In Ordinarily Well, the celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients’ dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light. Kramer homes in on the moment of clinical decision making: Prescribe or not? What evidence should doctors bring to bear? Using the wide range of reference that readers have come to expect in his books, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks the “inside baseball” of psychiatry—statistics—and shows how findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions. Kramer never loses sight of patients. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications’ influence on his patients’ symptoms, behavior, careers, families, and quality of life. He updates his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful, and welcome, tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal—becoming ordinarily well.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A 3-year-old asks her physician father about his job, and his inability to provide a succinct and accurate answer inspires a critical look at the profession of modern medicine. In sorting through how patients, insurance companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and comedians misconstrue a doctor's role, Andrew Bomback, M.D., realizes that even doctors struggle to define their profession. As the author attempts to unravel how much of doctoring is role-playing, artifice, and bluffing, he examines the career of his father, a legendary pediatrician on the verge of retirement, and the health of his infant son, who is suffering from a vague assortment of gastrointestinal symptoms. At turns serious, comedic, analytical, and confessional, Doctor offers an unflinching look at what it means to be a physician today. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.