Thinking differently about mental health

I’ve just watched Joanna Moncrieff being interviewed on It’s your life with James “JC” Cooley” (see video ), one of several video podcasts t...

As I wrote in my book chapter  (see extract ), "From the beginning, the aim of the Philadelphia Association (PA) was to "change t...

As Diana and Nikolas Rose wrote in their 2023  Psychological Medicine article  (see previous post ), psychiatrists tend to see themselves as...

The Mental Health Act 2025 amending the Mental Health Act 1983 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 (see DHSC press release ). Alex Ruc...

I’ve criticised Ed Bullmore, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's Coll...

Is it me that is different or is it my brain? Everyone is different, aren’t they? But is it because of my brain? Many people find the diagno...

The UK government has set up an independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism (see press release ). The aim is to examin...

The belief that mental illness will be shown to be caused by the brain dominates psychiatric thinking. Of course brain abnormalities can cau...

I’ve never been convinced that any apparent response to antidepressants is more than placebo. Although short-term clinical trials may show a...

The concept of childhood autism originated independently in the work of Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. The original paper by Kanner ( 1943 ) ...

Mental health practitioners need to know that there is a mind-body problem. Not that they need to be philosophers, but the mind-body problem...

Stephan Oliveira, a Brazilian psychiatrist, provides a rich phenomenological account for psychiatry in his book Barbarism and the human: Ph...

I’ve commonly mentioned Theodor Meynert (1833-92), a psychiatrist who thought he had delineated various ‘fibre-systems’ in the brain from hi...

As a veteran of the antidepressant withdrawal debate (see eg. previous post ), my views are often marginalised on Twitter (eg. see recent tw...

Moncrieff et al ( 2025 ) reappraise the systematic review of antidepressant withdrawal by Henssler et al (2024). As I said in a  previous po...

ADHD is commonly said to be a neurological developmental disorder. The difficulty I have with this statement is that it implies ADHD is a br...

Doctors have always minimised the significance of antidepressant discontinuation problems (see eg. previous post ). It doesn’t seem to conce...

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...

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

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

A  Sunday Times investigation found that a quarter of women in their fifties and sixties take antidepressants, and 15% of women over 50 have...

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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

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