I do not foresee any new medicines for psychiatry coming any day soon.
Everybody wants fast acting psychotropics, but that is not possible for most psychiatric disorders.
But integration of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy can be extremely rewarding.
A lot of people think antidepressants are worthless. Is psychotherapy better than an antidepressant? There is no evidence for this. It seems to me that antidepressants suffer a disadvantage in our perception as compared to psychotherapy, in that their mechanism of action is quite invisible and not instinctively comprehensible.
Depression lifts with placebo pills, joint pain disappears after a placebo operation. Changes in the brain can be observed after the use of a placebo. How do such effects of sham treatment come about? Placebos do have effects. But THE placebo effect does not exist.
