Antidepressants in pregnancy – turning a blind eye, again
The psychiatric establishment are keen to reassure people, but the evidence suggest few benefits and many potential risks of taking antidepressants in pregnancy.
Wishful thinking dressed up in scientific terminology: a reply to Awais Aftab
Awais Aftab’s blog about the Sunday Times article on my new book, Chemically Imbalanced, was predictable. Like previous reactions to our serotonin paper, it illustrates how elements of the psychiatric profession attempt to control the message that gets out to the public. Aftab even subtitled his blog ‘British journalists and editors this is for you’.…
Contradictory responses to our review of serotonin and depression
After the publication of our umbrella review of serotonin last summer, several psychiatrists wrote letters to the journal, Molecular Psychiatry, as usually occurs after the publication of a major finding. We were invited by the editor of the journal to respond to the points raised in the letters, again a routine procedure in scientific literature.…
How profit and professional interests have misled us about antidepressants
Our umbrella review that revealed no links between serotonin and depression has caused shock waves among the general public, but been dismissed as old news by psychiatric opinion leaders. This disjunction begs the questions of why the public have been fed this narrative for so long, and what antidepressants are actually doing if they are…
‘First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you …’*
Summary: I respond to some of the points in the recent Rolling Stone article and correct the many inaccuracies and distortions. Ignoring is no longer working, so champions of big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry have gone into attack mode. The strategy is to undermine the messenger (me) in order to neutralise the message. In this…
How to take the news that depression has not been shown to be caused by a chemical imbalance
Summary TL;DR For decades people have been told that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency. This was the rationale behind the introduction of the SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) antidepressants in the 1990s, which were thought to work by boosting low levels of serotonin. Our research shows no evidence of low serotonin in depression,…
Systematic umbrella review finds no evidence that serotonin abnormalities are associated with depression (but don’t stop your drugs suddenly)
Our new review of serotonin research collated research from six different areas. We looked at research on serotonin levels in body fluids, levels of the main metabolite (breakdown product) of serotonin in the cerebro-spinal fluid (brain fluid), serotonin receptors, the serotonin transporter protein (the protein that removes serotonin from the synapse where it is active-…
How little we really know about psychiatric drugs
In this blog I reflect on what has and has not changed in the field of psychiatric drug treatment in the years between the first and newly published second edition of the Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs.
Persistent withdrawal and lasting damage from prescribed drugs
The recent furore caused by publication of evidence about the serious nature of antidepressant withdrawal made me reflect on the lasting damage that can sometime be done by prescription drugs, and how it has often taken concerted efforts by users of these drugs to bring these effects to public attention. Historically, the medical community…
Continuing the antidepressant debate: the clinical (ir)relevance of drug-placebo differences
German psychiatrist, Stefan Leucht and colleagues, have produced another really important paper (1). The results indicate that the small differences usually found between antidepressants and placebo are far below the sort of differences that would be clinically detectable or meaningful. Leucht et al have conducted the first thorough, systematic attempt to provide some empirical evidence…
Joanna Moncrieff 