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 