It seems to me that when psych patients take meds and then feel better, they give credit to the meds. I think that credit can be misplaced. If you go on and off a med a number of times and you see a consistent pattern, then I can see a basis to the conclusion that the med helped. But sometimes it could just be coincidence. Here's a doctor who sees this as I do.

"But I’ve also made an observation that seems incompatible with one of the central dogmas of psychiatry. To put it bluntly, I’m not sure that psychiatric medications work.

Before you jump to the conclusion that I’m just another disgruntled, anti-medication psychiatrist who thinks we’ve all been bought and misled by the pharmaceutical industry, please wait. The issue here is, to me, a deeper one than saying that we drug people who request a pill for every ill. In fact, it might even be a stretch to say that medications never work. I’ve seen antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and even interventions like ECT give results that are actually quite miraculous.

But here’s my concern: For the vast majority of my patients, when a medication “works,” there are numerous other potential explanations, and a simple discussion may reveal multiple other hypotheses for the clinical response. And when you consider the fact that no two people “benefit” in quite the same way from the same drug, it becomes even harder to say what’s really going on. There’s nothing scientific about this process whatsoever."

From: Why I?m not sure that psychiatric medications work

People want to believe that they got better by taking the meds. But, maybe, they just got better, for awhile. And when multiple drugs are in play, it's very hard to know ehat is foing what. When I was on 5 psycotropics, no one including me knew what was doin what. When I woke uo with a pounding heartrate of 140 beats a minute, there was no telling what caused it. Bu that was the end of my willingness to swallow all that stuff. I was lucky. Many oatients on that many meds wake uo dead.