A double-blind outpatient study of diazepam (Valium) and placebo

Summary Investigators reporting clinical studies of diazepam tend to be enthusiastic about its effectiveness in controlling anxiety, but two careful double-blind studies on hospitalized patients found diazepam relatively ineffective. This investigation covering an outpatient population of one hundred found that treatment with diazepam was not significantly superior to placebo. Moreover, diazepam treatment was also associated in some patients with the emergence of suicidal thoughts or tendencies and paranoid tendencies in others.This study was undertaken by the Psychopharmacology Research and Treatment Unit. It was supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service (MH 05090).