That brings me to my third point, the environmental influence of the administration of psychotropics; how much of the benefit observed is due to the physiological response versus the psychological response incorporating the administration and the administrator?
We consistently see that in a clinical setting psychotropics work wonders while released patients left to their own self-medication cause grievous failures.
That's why they require studies that are
randomized (in terms of patient selection so as to not pick the worst cases for the placebo and less severe patients for the drug),
controlled (meaning that a placebo group is used),
double-blind (whereas both the treater and the patient do not know which is active drug and which is placebo).
Typically in studies of depression (depending on the type of depression and severity) placebo response is 30% and response to drug is 70%. Many drug studies only look at the difference between the active and control groups in order to evaluate a drug.