How We Have Been Misled About Antidepressants

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8/23/2022Updated: 8/25/2022

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Commentary

Our umbrella review that revealed no links between serotonin and depression has caused shock waves among the general public, but has been dismissed as old news by psychiatric opinion leaders. This disjunction begs the questions of why the public has been fed this narrative for so long, and what antidepressants are actually doing if they are not reversing a chemical imbalance.

Joanna Moncrieff

Author

Joanna Moncrieff is a professor of critical and social psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS. She researchers and writes about the over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs and about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She is currently leading UK government-funded research on reducing and discontinuing antipsychotic drug treatment (the RADAR study), and collaborating on a study to support antidepressant discontinuation. In the 1990s she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network to link up with other, like-minded psychiatrists. She is author of numerous papers and books, including “A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs” (2020), “The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs” (2013), and “The Myth of the Chemical Cure” (2009). Her website is JoannaMoncrieff.com.