Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior

Tell me something I dont already know. Anyway this link (https://bfy.tw/SKWq) will help you on your way. :)

Uncomfortable questions indeed. It is honestly hard to comprehend how people believe in it at all. I understand that people do, but it’s mystifying, like a belief in god or even Santa Claus.

Regardless, justice systems (incentives and accountability) and incarceration (incentives, and ideally rehabilitation) have nothing to do with free will. Any connection between free will (presence or absence) and the justice system seems to stems from some weird idea that it is about “punishing bad guys” or balancing some cosmic ledger. It is not. It is about controlling people just enough to ensure the long-term maintenance of society, as imperfect as our current implementation is. Look up Restorative Justice for approaches that focus on restorative outcomes for all involved, eschewing punishment and eye-for-eye thinking.

The cancerous cell does not carry any moral value; and neither does the immune system that destroys it. The cell infected by a virus is a victim of its circumstance, but that does not mean the immune system is should not destroy it.

Someone else took a look at your [0] and reported that your description doesn't match what [0] actually says. So I thought I'd take a look at [1].

[1] is a letter to the British Journal of Psychiatry by one Gordon Parker. It does two things: first it briefly mentions a study by Kirsch et al which you can find at https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... and then it makes some comments on the significance of that study's results.

It's the results of Kirsch et al that you're referring to here (Parker says that they found that "newer antidepressant drugs are equivalent to or no better than placebos"; the rest of Parker's letter is concerned with the question of what the study's findings mean.

So, two questions. First, since Parker rather than Kirsch is what you cited, does Parker in fact say that "long term outcomes on psychiatric drugs are no better than placebo"? Nope. He says there are three possible explanations for results like Kirsch's: (1) the drugs are ineffective, (2) the analyses are no good, (3) something about randomized controlled trials makes them unsuitable for answering this sort of question. "The third explanation – that there are substantive limitations to current procedures for testing antidepressant treatments – is argued here as the most sustainable."

OK, so the source you're citing doesn't agree with your claim, but maybe the source he cites does? I linked to Kirsch et al above, and have two observations to make. The first is that "no better than placebo" is better than it sounds, because it seems that placebo is actually pretty effective against depression! The second is that what they find is, unequivocally, not "no better than placebo". It's "not very much better than placebo". Their exact words: "Although the difference between these means easily attained statistical significance [], it does not meet the three-point drug–placebo criterion for clinical significance used by NICE."

(Kirsch et al also looked at whether these effects differ depending on how bad the depression is. They do: if you are more severely depressed, the effect of antidepressant drugs isn't very different but the effect of placebo decreases as the severity of the depression increases. Which again looks to me as if the situation is more "placebo is pretty good for depression" than "antidepressants are no good".

So I'd say you're zero for two at this point.

I took a quick look at [2] as well, because why not.

Right in the abstract it says: "There are no placebo treatments." so this is definitely not offering any support for a comparison between antidepressant drugs and placebo. Maybe it's intended instead to support your claim about relapse rates after long-term use followed by discontinuation? Doesn't seem possible, given the study's purpose and structure.

They were trying to answer the question: if you're suffering from depression, and the usual antidepressants don't do a good job of treating it, what else might work well?. So the plan was to take a bunch of patients with major depressive disorder, and give them 8-12 weeks of citalopram. If that works well, they're out of the study. If not, they get some other treatments, involving some combination of other medications and/or cognitive therapy. If that doesn't work, they try some other drugs. If that doesn't work, try some other drugs. And then, if the first antidepressant didn't work well but one of the later things did, keep them on that for the next 12 months and check monthly on how it's going.

You will note that nothing in this description offers any way to look for relapse rates for patients who use an antidepressant drug for a prolonged period and then stop. The only patients who are using an antidepressant drug for a prolonged period in this study aren't stopping.

So what did the study find? Well, the page you linked to says ... "No results posted".

Maybe you just posted the wrong link. It appears that the study was actually done. There is some information about the results here: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/funding/clinical-research/practical.... I don't see anything there that looks like it supports any of your claims.

Zero for three. At this point I don't feel much enthusiasm for checking your other two links.

Until we have effective behavior-altering treatments that 'correct' people we have to insist on personal responsibility so that they can be put in prison.

not to mention the risk of blood clots. my wife had thrombosis and nearly died because of birth control meds, and once you look into it, it's more common than you'd think and women do not get nearly enough warning about the risk. All her friends went back to condoms and those more localized IUD hormone things