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’.…
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.…
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…
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…
Joanna Moncrieff 