Thinking differently about mental health

Moving from an outdated physical disease model of mental illness to a more relational mental health practice

Friday, June 27, 2025

Common mental health conditions have worsened despite Improving Access to Psychological Therapies

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Part 1 of the Adult Psychiatric Morbidty Survey (APMS) for 2023/4 has been published (see website ). The last time this survey was sampled w...
2 comments:
Wednesday, June 25, 2025

What counts as psychopathology?

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Sami Timimi in his recent book, Searching for normal , describes how the diagnoses of autism and ADHD have changed over the years. They have...
Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Transforming mental health services

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Pullman et al ( 2025 ) consider how social work could contribute to the transformation in mental health services from a predominately medica...
Monday, June 16, 2025

Stuck on antidepressants

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A  Sunday Times investigation found that a quarter of women in their fifties and sixties take antidepressants, and 15% of women over 50 have...
2 comments:
Saturday, June 07, 2025

Universal remedies for mental health problems

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I’ve mentioned the problems with mental health services in Greater Manchester before (eg. see previous post ). Mental health workers in Manc...

How we have been misled about the nature of depression

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Joanna Moncrieff’s abstract for her Sowerby Project 10 year anniversary public lecture, ‘Changing our minds: How we have been misled about t...
Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Vision for mental health policy

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Penelope Campling’s book On the brink   with patients’ stories from her life in psychiatry starts at the end of the asylum years, when many ...
Saturday, May 10, 2025

Taking the debate about antidepressants forward

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Joanna Moncrieff’s book Chemically imbalanced at least seems to have ruffled a few feathers, as it has led to a Lancet editorial . It’s not ...
Wednesday, May 07, 2025

Making psychiatry more open-minded

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Peter Gøtzsche is not joking when he asks if psychiatrists are more mad than their patients (see his Mad in America blog post ). I understan...
1 comment:
Friday, April 18, 2025

Difficulties of psychiatrists identifying with their profession

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I’ve mentioned the 1996 article by David Kaiser ‘Against biologic psychiatry’ in a previous post . He described why he found it increasingly...
Sunday, April 06, 2025

Assessing the risks of psychotropic medication

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The executive order establishing the US President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission has caused concern amongst leading psychiatric or...
Thursday, March 20, 2025

Drug regulator thinks it’s reasonable to mislead people about chemical imbalance in depression

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In a reply to a letter from Peter Gøtzsche, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency ( MHRA ) has made clear that it has no ...
1 comment:
Saturday, March 01, 2025

Easy solutions to psychological problems?

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Psychological problems are common. People don't always adjust to difficulties in life and relationships very well. They don't always...
1 comment:
Saturday, February 22, 2025

Psychiatry is doomed to conflict about the value of psychiatric medication

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Doctors have always exaggerated the advantages of medication. But medication, including recreational drugs, can’t just be eliminated. There ...
Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Sticking to the argument about whether antidepressants work

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I worry that the clash between Joanna Moncrieff and Awais Aftab about her new book Chemically imbalanced has become too personal (see eg. la...
Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Indoctrinating people into taking antidepressants

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People are being misled about the nature of mental illness. Of course brain abnormalities can cause organic mental illness, such as delirium...
Thursday, January 30, 2025

Depression is real but not a concrete thing

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Functional mental illness is an abstract not concrete concept. It differs from organic mental illness where there is brain dysfunction. Illn...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 23, 2025

The disadvantages of antidepressants

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As I’ve said before (see eg. previous post ), I’m inclined to believe that antidepressants are no better than placebo. I can’t prove this bu...
Tuesday, January 21, 2025

The sorry state of modern academic psychiatry

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I’m not sure who advised the king about the appointment of Ed Bullmore as Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psy...

Emotional blunting more a reflection that antidepressants don’t work than how they do

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I’ve mentioned before my concerns about the notion that antidepressants work through being emotional suppressants (see eg. previous post ). ...
Saturday, January 18, 2025

Confusing brain and placebo effects of antidepressants

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Jo Moncrieff in her new book Chemically imbalanced (see eg. previous post ) discusses Peter Kramer’s 1993 book Listening to Prozac (see Wik...
Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Psychiatry misleading the public about chemical imbalance in depression

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Awais Aftab has responded (see his blog post ) to the Sunday Times  magazine article about Joanna Moncrieff (see eg. previous post ). He rai...
Monday, January 13, 2025

Daring to argue that depression is not a physical disease

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I mentioned the Sunday Times magazine article about Joanna Moncrieff in my last post , where I focused on the issue of whether antidepressa...
1 comment:
Sunday, January 12, 2025

The legitimacy of asking whether antidepressants work

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The Sunday Times magazine has an article about Joanna Moncrieff promoting the publication this week of her new book , Chemically imbalanced...
Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Discovering what psychiatry’s really like

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I talked about Jan Foudraine in the first  chapter of my edited Critical Psychiatry book . As I said, he became the ‘personal ambassador...
Friday, December 13, 2024

What does it mean to be diagnosed with ADHD?

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Owen Jones is a succesful Guardian journalist. He was central to the Jeremy Corbyn movement. He feels as though he has been held back by h...
Saturday, November 23, 2024

Psychiatry needs to be more thoughtful

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Linda Gask, who I have mentioned before (see eg. previous post ), has reviewed Conversations in critical psychiatry (2024) edited by Awais ...
Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Is psychiatric diagnosis of any value?

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I responded (follow my Twitter thread ) to a  tweet  by  Justin Garson (mentioned in  previous post ) . What he said was:- I can’t fathom ho...
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