People have used psychoactive substances to dull and deaden pain, misery and suffering since time immemorial, but only recently, in the last few decades, have people been persuaded that what they are doing in this situation is rightly thought of as taking a remedy for an underlying disease. The spread of the use of prescription…
In order to explore the current political context of mental health services, as I will be doing in some upcoming blogs, it is necessary to establish what the modern mental health system actually consists of and what function it serves. It is only by tracing the historical development of mental health services, and analysing how…
Two pieces of research have been published over the last two years that should prompt a major reorientation of the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis, and a fundamental reappraisal of the use of antipsychotic drugs in general. Put together, these studies suggest that the standard approach to treating serious mental health problems may cause more…
Evidence that antipsychotics cause brain shrinkage has been accumulating over the last few yearsbut the psychiatric research establishment is finding its own results difficult to swallow. A new paper by a group of American researchers once again tries to ‘blame the disease,’ a time honoured tactic for diverting attention from the nasty and dangerous effects…
One of the strongest memories I have from the time when I was a medical student in the 1980s is of a young woman who was brought into a hospital in northern England. Confused and frightened, she poured out a profusion of fragmented ideas about having a gadget implanted in her body and feeling that…
Recently I attended a Mental Health Review Tribunal, set up to review a Community Treatment Order (CTO), as an independent witness. Although I agreed with the doctors who were treating the patient that the individual concerned did have some mental health problems, I was confident that these could be effectively managed without the need for…
Antidepressants have been in the news recently. The general feeling seems to be that although they are being overused and may have some unpleasant side effects, they certainly ‘work,’ at least in some people (1). So what is the evidence that antidepressants ‘work’? If you compare them with a dummy tablet or placebo in a…
Drugs are frequently prescribed for people with emotional and behavioural problems – problems we currently label as ‘depression,’ ‘schizophrenia,’ ‘bipolar disorder’ and ‘ADHD.’ In trying to understand more fully what these drugs actually do to people, I have formulated two different ‘models’ of drug action: the ‘disease-centred’ model, and the ‘drug-centred’ model. The disease-centred model…
Joanna Moncrieff 