The Placebo Effect
This is an interesting psychological experiment for those of you who do not know what the placebo effect is. In a nutshell, someone is tricked into thinking they are obtaining a substance that will better their condition. This is done by simply giving the person a “sugar pill” instead of any particular type of medicine. The effect? Witness the reaction. Psychologically, for a lot of people who have taken the experiment before, they would agree to feel better although the pill is just simply sugar. It is an experiment done to see the psychological processes taking place with substances.
The question I want to ask you now is, since the placebo effect has been shown to work, can we relate this effect to Thomas Szasz’s thoughts on the current medical model? I talked about this in my previous article titled, “The Progress Of Psychology“. Szasz believes that labeling a person with a disorder will simply make them give in and act out all the symptoms of the diagnosed disorder.
