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’.…
‘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,…
The Political Economy of the Mental Health System- a response to a commentary
Original article: Vincenzo’s commentary: Part 1 Part 2 For those who have not read my original article, it traces the social functions of the mental health system and its relationship to Capitalism. It suggests the principal functions of this system consist of the public provision of care for those who cannot care for themselves, and…
The uniqueness of life: a review of Peter Hacker’s “Human Nature: the Categorial Framework” and its implications for the mind-body problem and our understanding of mental disorder
Peter Hacker is an eminent philosopher and one of the world’s leading authorities on Wittgenstein. He has published a four volume analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations and a brilliant little book on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, now sadly out of print (1). He is also well known for his debunking of neuroscientific reductionism in…
Philosophy Part 7: So what is mental disorder? Part 1 Reasoning and meaning
So if mental disorders are not bodily diseases, as I argued in the last blog, what are they and how should we understand them? I realised trying to write this and the next two (and last) blogs how much more difficult it is to set out a positive notion of what mental disorder consists…
Guest blog: The 388, a Psychoanalytic Centre for the Treatment of Psychosis
I am often asked about alternative ways of helping people with severe mental disorder, especially psychosis. This guest blog by Antoine B.-Duchesne and Sarah Pham describes one such facility in Quebec. It is founded on psychoanalytic principles, but provides a holistic form of care that aims to promote community integration and help people find meaning:
Philosophy Part 5: Why disease and illness are concepts of the body.
In this blog I want to come back to the work of Thomas Szasz. The last two blogs argue that bodily states and processes need to be understood in a different way from the way we understand what human beings think and do. Mental ‘illness’ consists of things that people say and do. For Szasz,…
Psychiatry has its head in the sand: Royal College of Psychiatrists rejects discussion of crucial research on antipsychotics
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…
Joanna Moncrieff 