Psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff indicts her entire industry for falsely pushing deadly drugs as a “treatment” for depression. Her conclusion: They don’t work. And she’s got the evidence to prove it.
The psychiatric community awoke one morning in mid-January to find the foundations of their cash-cow alliance with Big Pharma yanked out from underneath them—and by one of their own.
A new history of antidepressants, authored by a psychiatrist, doesn’t so much make the case for the falsehood of the chemical treatment of depression as it does annihilate it.
Granularly researched with evidence as airtight as it is brutal, Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at University College London, indicts and convicts her entire industry for knowingly hawking deadly drugs on the for-profit pretense of “treating” depression.
Dr. Moncrieff resolved to unmask the fraud after leading a team of five top UK and European specialists on a review of studies to determine if there was, in fact, a relationship between the chemical serotonin and depression. Since the 1960s, psychiatrists have insisted—in articles, papers, websites and every platform they could shout from—that a “below-normal” amount of the so-called “feel-good” chemical serotonin is the cause of misery. Then, with the advent of “Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor” (SSRI) antidepressants in the 1990s, “chemical imbalance” became the Golden Calf psychiatrists and pharmaceutical giants worshipped: Simply jack up the depressed person’s serotonin with antidepressant snake-oil drugs that enrich psychiatrists and Big Pharma and thus remedy that “chemical imbalance.”
But Dr. Moncrieff and her team have thrown cold water on the “you’re-depressed-because-you-need-your-chemicals-rebalanced” party. In findings published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, she concluded that “there is no evidence of a connection between reduced serotonin levels of activity and depression.”
