Are Antidepressants Just Placebos with Side Effects?
By John Horgan on scientificamerican.com
I looked up the above page as one example of the revealing that the firm marketing Prozac distorted and hid internal results of their own trials that indicate no improvement over a placebo. While there is a case for fraud in this - as well as side effects from additives to the supposed active ingredient - I addressed the scientific relationship with placebo and thus with consciousness itself below. But the picture of a segregative and fearful mentality does offer illumination to the actions of Big Pharma or any other vested and powerful interest that has 'captured' its own regulators or become 'invisible' to the healing response that would undo their legitimacy and withdraw allegiance and support.
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The title gives away an ignorance; "Just placebos".
Science tends to 'just diminish' or even deny consciousness because it is built on a negative or fear-based definition of consciousness by which such 'self' and its experience of 'world' are divided and an almost entirely external 'reality' thus believed to happen to or even generate an almost entirely private self that then seeks to map out, adapt to, and manage or control it and thus engage in struggle that outpictures an inner conflict kept private and protected by focussing almost exclusively 'out there' or anywhere but within consciousness - even though all of our experience occurs within and as a consciousness event and is interpreted or rendered meaningful by the the definitions assigned it.
The negatively defined 'self' operates over and against
others and its world and its true nature. And does so as an incredible complex defence system. While you accept its thoughts or belief as your own.
Inspiration comes into an otherwise closed or limited focus because the conditions allow it. Conditional love is the mask of definition by which one permits communication and relationship to occur. It is always presence, but the mind maps out its fragmented personae as a strategy of coping with the intolerable.
Wanting something 'out there' to make it better is a kind of magic - but not to be derided if it works for the duration of its helpfulness.
Coming to an inner willingness to let life in - that is to stop blocking healing by complex levels of conscious and unconscious diversion and displacement - might pass through any kind of outer journey, but when the obstruction fades or diminishes, the synchronicity meets the willingness.
"Just placebo" is so powerful as to be invisible. Rationalists tend to deride beliefs, but are ignorant of the metaphysical assumptions within their self definition. And so they are often 'believers in Science' rather than applying the discipline of Science to all that it pertains - within and without.
The belief in "The One True Reality" persists in Science that thinks it threw of religious shackles. Depression can be many many different things at different times for different people. But within itself is a seed of being a natural part of a larger process of unfolding - that our definitions of self do not generally accept, understand or make culture of holding through.
But one has to work with people's belief systems rather than coercively impose definition upon them from "society" - for that is emotional and psychological violence regardless the 'god' that 'justifies the self-righteous'.
Exploring through experience is part of what Humanity is and does. The false is often if not always engaged with as a potential precursor to a waking to the true - and acting our as who you know you know yourself to be - and believe as an expression of the extension of value rather than a search for identity in the world. Loving and I use that to indicate genuine relationship - identifies us perfectly. The attempt to possess it, control it or milk it like the moneylenders or other gangster racketeers - offers a false identification that promises much, but delivers mere passing illusion and robs us of joy and life. However, I don't ask anyone to believe that. Just be honest with yourself rather than blank cheque allegiance to the thinking that frames everything falsely.
Honesty = I do not know, but paradoxically the yielding to that simple truth, shifts us to a receptivity of a knowing that is always current - and whilst it can in a sense be translated into verbal mental concept as insight or practical action of a helpful nature, it cannot be patented and stored and used as a weapon. Only a 'stolen' illegitimate copy can be paraded as a finely dressed Emperor.
The helpfulness of anything within a genuine desire for fulfilment is no one else's business. But if it becomes a hindrance it is to be thanked and released - or else what is currently helpful cannot come in.
The self we trade in and make currency of, is as much a con as the debt-based money system. It gives up wholeness of relationship and communication for a central controller. You wont find it in the body - not even the brain. There is no such controller - but there is a harmony of unified purpose and there is the virtual layer of the mind that can operate conflicting purpose - because mind is not coercive by nature - only in conceptual construct. The exploration of an apparently material 'Reality' can only flip to reveal Mind - but the mind identified and invested in its model and revenue stream works to obfuscate and delay the obvious as if it were its failure or death, rather than its re-purposing to alignment of integrated being. And so it exports failure and death because these are the values by which it believes itself prevailing victorious.
Everything is what we make of it - but what we are already making of it frames our options and conditions a sense of unnecessary or illegitimate limitation.
