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Why there’s no such thing as an ‘antidepressant’
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...
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Neutralising suffering: how the medicalisation of distress obliterates...
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...
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The Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression: still promoted but still unfounded
A long overdue debate is raging about the chemical imbalance theory of depression. Having been deluged with this idea for two decades now, the general public has come to believe that it is a...
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Continuing the antidepressant debate: the clinical (ir)relevance of...
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...
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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...
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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...
View ArticleSystematic umbrella review finds no evidence that serotonin abnormalities are...
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...
View ArticleHow to take the news that depression has not been shown to be caused by a...
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)...
View Article‘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...
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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...
View ArticleContradictory 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...
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