Apparently one of the experiments they routinely conduct with new schizophrenia medicines to check their effectiveness is to compare them to a placebo. Now for many of us we don’t act too rationally when our symptoms are acting up and I personally don’t sleep at all. So what do they do for those taking the placebos. Do they let them stay at their own place fully psychotic which may lead to many bad things happening or do they keep them in a situation where they’ll be OK? Do they take their regular meds in addition to the drug being tested. Or do the test subjects not respond to any drug out there and are just holding on as it is. That type of experimentation kind of bothers me.
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This bothers me too.
Most studies are more complex than you’d think. There are confounds and controls for confounds, with a lot of statistics thrown in. I participated in a study at school where I would guess about twenty people did various tasks two hours a day on a computer. I talked to the professor in charge of the study, and he said the numbers they had to crunch were huge.
Some studies seem so artificial to me that I have to doubt their worth. Sometimes an experimenter has an agenda he wants to promote. You can argue about such things endlessly.
As for this experiment, it seems like there are a lot of potential confounds in it. There are many factors that influence how a sz behaves. It seems to me like this is a study best conducted in a hospital setting. I don’t think there is any other way they could manage it. I don’t know how they could control all the confounds outside of a hospital setting. There might be a way, but I doubt it.