If you are reading this, there is a 26% chance that you have a psychiatric disorder. Don’t worry — about a third of you are certain to get better…somehow.

In a study conducted by researchers supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), called the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R), it was found that in the U.S. 26 percent of the general population reported that they had symptoms sufficient for diagnosing a mental disorder during the past 12 months. We’ve taken the leap that our readers represent the general population when it comes to disorders.

If you don’t like these odds, don’t worry, according to our own study on the issue there is a 100% chance that the writers of Independent Sources have a psychiatric disorder.

Now the odds of getting better. It turns out about a third of us all will get better regardless of what treatment we select due solely to the placebo effect.

“The data from our sample of 6,931 patients, who underwent five noneffective treatments, clusters around one-third excellent results, one-third good results, and one-third poor results…”

“The priest said that about a third of the people he ministers to are healed, another third are ‘noticeably improved’, and the other third are unchanged.”

“Put 100 patients on any antidepressant, and about a third will respond beautifully.  Another third will have a partial response and the last third will not respond at all.”

Of course, if you consider your disorder to be the result of something so incurable and so out of your control that nothing can ever be done about it, then you will lose the placebo option.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 12:37 am by Insider and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.