 If these people were already intent on signing up to better help, then you're skewing the study group's decisions. Man, I thought all this better help stuff was over, but the right opinion just made a better help video. And he actually brought up some really good points and might have exposed even more in the mental health industry that we need to talk about right now. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and something I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community and make videos that can help you with your mental and emotional well-being. So, if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. So, the right opinion. Good guy. Good guy. I enjoy his channel. Anyways, it's been like a month since all the better help stuff, and he just released a video. And I want to focus on the part where he talked about the studies. It's like a 40-minute long video. One of my subscribers named Ephraim. I think I'd say his name right. He showed me this video. I just got done watching. I want to focus on one specific part, though. So, anyways, some of you have been around for a while. You know I've made some videos about better help. But for those of you who are new, full disclosure, I am still a better help affiliate, and I still will continue to be. One of the main reasons is that my beautiful girlfriend uses better help and met her amazing therapist through better help that is local here in Las Vegas, and she's been using her ever since. But I also have other friends who use it. So, I'm just going to leave it at that because I don't want to do any more better help videos defending this stuff, like figure out what you want to do, and that's it. But anyways, if you're still here, we're going to talk about some pretty important stuff when it comes to mental health as a whole. So, something that the right opinion was talking about in his better help video was the studies they did, okay? And how their studies were kind of like BSed a little bit and things like that. So, I will say this, although I support better help, I just want you to try it if you want, and then make your decisions off that. I don't think anybody, just logically, I don't think anybody should base anything off of success rates. Reviews are even difficult to base anything off of, whether they're good or bad. So, part of my experience, just so you all know, I worked in mental health treatment for the last three years. Okay? Over three years now. Part of my job has been working on the outcome studies. So, we call them outcome studies, kind of like what the right opinion was talking about. These are outcome studies. So, he was pointing out the percentage of people who benefited from the service and, you know, their mental health improved or their symptoms of depression decreased and all of that. So, like, this is just something like, you know, he talked about it. Like, I absolutely agree. It's kind of like a corporate issue, and this is why all of you need to be more educated on all of these mental health subjects. Like, if you want to get the best mental health help, like, please just do your research, watch videos like mine or other people's. Like, the right opinion actually understands how, like, research and studies go, so I, like, really respected him for that. So, I became particularly intrigued when I noticed on their front page, they boasted a 98% rate of individuals involved in their programs making significant progress. Despite the fact that only 70% experienced an alleged reduction in depression, which is a rather sizable margin, considering I just tune my reduction in symptoms is correlated with the idea of progress. But I want to talk about some more stuff today when it comes to antidepressant medications. So, yeah, like, when I first read the book Lost Connections, it freaked me out because the information I'm about to give you about antidepressants you may not know. And if you're taking antidepressants and they're working, please keep taking them, okay? I just want to get the proper information out there. Like, look, this is my Prozac right here. I still take them. And what we're going to be talking about is, like, I don't even know if it's actually working, okay? So, let's talk about the kind of data and the research that goes behind this stuff, okay? So, basically, back in the day, oh, this guy's still alive. His name's Dr. Irving Kirsch, I believe. He wrote a book called The Emperor's New Drugs. And what he did was, you know, he is, I believe, a psychologist or psychiatrist, and he has a lot of clients who have been benefiting from antidepressants. But he wanted to kind of find out more about this. Like, what's helping? How are these, how is this helping? Because you might be watching this video. Like, you might be the perfect example. Like, why do antidepressants work for some, but not others, right? If this is a chemical imbalance issue, shouldn't you just be able to take some of these? It balances out the chemicals and everything's all honky-dory. Like, that's how it should work, right? So, something that Irving started doing was he wanted to, like, kind of, like, you know, evaluate the numbers, right? And take a look. So, typically, when you're doing research on any type of medication, what you'll do is, you'll have the actual antidepressant, in this case, we're talking about antidepressants. Then you'll have a placebo, which is, like, typically a sugar pill, okay? So you give one group of people the antidepressant, one people the sugar pill, and you kind of just see their progress and see what happens, okay? But one of the issues that Irving came across is that no matter what you're taking, there's always going to be a placebo effect, alright? So that placebo effect is mixed in with the actual potential results of the medication that you're taking. So, something that they had to kind of figure out is, like, you know, are people just getting better with time or because of their situations? Like, something I try to teach all of you is, like, although chemical imbalances are real, clinical depression, like, the way our brains work and, you know, create different neurotransmitters, that is very real. But one of the things is, when's the last time you actually went to the doctor and they checked your serotonin levels, or they checked your dopamine levels, or they checked your norepinephrine levels? You know what I mean? Like, they don't do that, so we just got to kind of, like, hope that these medications are going to work, right? So, to do a better study, what they ended up doing was they got three groups, okay? Three groups. So the first group, they gave them pills and they said, these are antidepressants, but the pills they gave them were actually placebos. They were just sugar pills, okay? Then in group two, they actually gave them antidepressants, alright? Then in group three, they didn't give them anything. They didn't give them anything at all, they just tracked their progress over time. So one of the things is, is that this third group was extremely important. Like, they had to see if people who had the symptoms of depression just got better over time. So, like, the best analogy I can give you is, it's kind of like having a cold, right? Like, you can go take cold medicine, but is it really speeding up your recovery? Because most people who have a cold, even though depression and colds are different, like, most people who have a cold, they could just, you know, they will get better. Like, the body just creates, you know, the natural antibodies and you recover from a cold. So that's why the third group is important, because they're trying to look at depression and say, do people just get better over time, right? And I've mentioned this book before, I've done an entire video on it. There's a book called Lost Connections. And for a lot of us, you'll find that, you know, many things that help with depression have nothing to do with medications. So the way that they got the results from this test, okay, they had the three groups. So what they had to do was subtract the people who got better over time, so from group three, then subtract the people from group one, okay? So the people who got lessened their symptoms of depression based on a placebo, and the people who had less symptoms of depression based on just doing whatever and just living their life, okay? And the results really tripped, erving out, okay? So check this out. Check this out. 25%, it was purely due to natural recovery, okay? Now, 50%. 50% of people had lessened symptoms of depression just based on the story that they were told about the medications. So a big part of the way medications work is the story that we're told. When we give you a pill, like, this is why I try to teach everybody to meditate, and I'm so adamant about it, like, your mind is such a powerful thing. 50% of people had less symptoms of depression just because they were told the pill was an antidepressant. How crazy is that? So then, the last 25%, the medication actually helped. So think about that for a second. These antidepressants only helped 25% of people. So this guy, Erving, he, like, went through this data like a million times. He's like, this can't be right. This can't be right. These medications are supposed to work. They're supposed to be the best thing to help with this depression, but they were only really helping 25% of the time. Now, like, something that the right opinion brought up, like, who's doing these studies? Who is doing these studies? Now, when you're looking at antidepressant success rates, here's what you've got to understand. Most of those studies are done by pharmaceutical companies, all right? Like, think about that for a second. Now, for all the studies, for all the studies that the pharmaceutical companies do, only about 60% is what people see, okay? So there's 40% of the results from these studies that just nobody even sees, okay? But there's something called the Freedom of Information Act, Erving, and then there's another doctor, I forgot his name, but they got together and they followed a Freedom of Information Act with the FDA and they got the results back a few months later. And this is important because this is something that we call publication bias, right? So an analogy that Johann Hara used in his book, Lost Connections, was imagine you take, like, 50 selfies, right? And you, like, get rid of all your bad ones. You get rid of the ones with your double chin. So you take 50 selfies and you put the best one online, right? So the publication bias that these pharmaceutical companies have is that they only publish their best results. So by them getting all of the data, they can really see, you know, more so what's actually happening. So some of the medications that they wanted to get, like, all of the research on was Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and Afexor. I think there was, like, another one in there, too. So something that they found with the Prozac study was that they had 245 people in this study. 245 people in this study. And only 27 of them have positive effects from the medication. Like, that's pretty crazy if you think about it, right? You get 245 depressed people, you give them a medication, and it only worked for 27 of them, all right? So once they gathered all this data, they turned to something called the Hamilton Scale, okay? This was a scale that was created, I believe, in the 1950s to kind of measure depression, okay? And it's on a scale of about 50. So the lower on that scale, the worse, the higher, the better, okay? So the higher the less of the symptoms. So just to let you know, like, on the Hamilton Scale, in order to move six points in the positive direction, you just need to get better at night's sleep, right? So people who start getting better sleep, they get six points in the right direction. So their depression starts to decrease just by sleep. So pro tip, let's work on your sleep, all right? Now, when they looked at the results of medications, it only moved on that Hamilton Scale in the positive direction, 1.8 points. Think about that. So less than a third, less than a third of the positive results you get from fixing your sleep schedule, that's crazy. That's crazy. Now, like I said, if you're taking antidepressants and they're working, go for it. Like, but one of the reasons I'm making this video is A, just because big pharma is big pharma, but two, like something I always try to tell you guys is medications will not fix your problem. They will never fix your problem. Not anti-anxiety, not antidepressants. Like they are only going to get you so far because I'll tell you this. If you have been in a dark headspace like I get in when my depression hits, like 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale is huge. 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale is me getting out of bed. 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale is me getting out of the house. 1.8 points on the Hamilton Scale is me, you know, talking with my friends. You see what I mean? So I just want to let you know like there's other things that you can do that can actually help your depression even more. So again, like I'm glad that the right opinion made this video and really like he dove deep on those studies. I love that. If any of you watched John Oliver of last week tonight, I highly suggest you watch his video about scientific studies. It's hilarious and you'll get so much insight to how these studies are actually conducted because like every time you turn on the news, like new studies say that this cures cancer. New studies says that this takes years off, like whatever. But they talk about that and they give you like some legitimate proof about how most studies are complete BS. But anyways, I want to hear from all of you down in the comments below. Like what's your experience with these beautiful antidepressants or whichever ones you take? And if, if you would like, like let us know down in the comments. What do you feel has helped your depression as much or more than antidepressants? Like there's a reason why I don't talk about medications all the time on my channel. Like fixing your relationships, changing the way that you, you perceive things in this world, right? Gratitude list, making connections with other people, joining the rewired soldier Facebook group and talking to other people about your issues, having people help you get into the solution. All these things can help in your depression. So if you have any tips that can help people with depression, once they get to that baseline with their antidepressants, let's have a conversation down below. Alright, so anyways, that's all I got for you with this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I'll make a ton of videos about mental health. And I want to give a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel of our Patreon. You're all amazing. Help me do what I love, which is helping people with their mental health. And if you would like to become a patron for as little as a dollar a month, go to the top right there, alright? Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.