Thank you for highlighting statistics and placebo effects. Many of your comments would match well what I have written in other articles about treatments for depression, ADHD, and anxiety conditions.

I will take exception to the comment about Dr. Burns. Some of his research ruled out some of the specific mechanisms by which medications by working but he certainly did not disprove either the presence of chemical imbalances, or that should these be found, that they are involved in producing depression. When Panic Attacks is a great book (although very little of it is actually about panic, and much more on other anxiety conditions), but by that time he also had a very large career and financial incentives to build up CBT approaches and trash medications.