Imagine we’re back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. You’re feeling depressed and no one wants to talk to you, so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems. But even after talking things out with your shrink, you’re still not feeling great. All hope seems lost. Then the shrink tells you not to despair, because you have the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms, called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs.
If you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you could get a placebo that does nothing. You’re told it’s a win-win: If you participate in the clinical trial, Big Pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drugs actually works. And you have a chance of being cured. If you’re not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario isn’t a big deal. Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects — like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on. And in exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away. So what do you have to lose?
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