Why Are You Mad?

No medicine for mental illness works as well as a placebo. You want to paint your living room. You can’t decide between beige and blue.

One way to make up your mind would be to apply a few strokes of beige on one wall and a few strokes of blue on one of the other walls Just stand back and look at the beige. Try to imagine how the room would look. Then do the same for the blue. You now have tested both colors.

But, suppose that, for some unfathomable reason, you mix the two colors together instead and then you paint a few strokes of the concoction on one of the walls. You have not tested either beige or blue.

Eli Lilly apparently had a good premonition of what some of the side effects they could expect might be when they tested Prozac. They found a way to minimize those side effects.

Old Eli required that everyone taking Prozac also take a second little pill: benzodiazepine. You might know it better by another name: Valium.

By mixing the two, as with mixing beige and blue, neither the Prozac nor the Valium was really tested. This, however, failed to deter Mr. Lilly. His public relations minions touted Prozac as the most tested drug in history. In actual fact, Eli Lilly never tested Prozac itself.