Status Updates From The Emperor's New Drugs

They also have a hypothesis that the worse the depression, the lower the placebo effect goes down (because these people have probably tried multiple medications before already without success, so don’t have that hope) - so they are given higher dosages and improve, further correlating worse side effects with better placebo outcome.

Now in their study they have given people active placebos, so that they will still receive some side effects so they don’t “break blind” - those people got even better, not from the drug effect, but because more side effects correlated with the placebo of these drugs working harder. The rougher the side effects the better they “heal” from depression.