Informed Consent Isn't Pill-Shaming Or Moral Panicking

BUT: Amazon is your doctor now, ghosts are common, and beavers are a/c units

So much antidepressant drama this week, ya’ll!

Critical psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz put out an umbrella review (like a super-review of studies) on the serotonin theory of depression, compiling every study they could find on the subject and concluding that the idea of chemical imbalance is not supported by evidence.

This will not be a surprise to most of you, because I’ve been writing about it for a while now, and psychiatrists have been jumping in to remind everyone it’s not a surprise to them either.

Moncrieff and Horowitz wrote an article about their study in The Conversation which, as the kids say, popped the fuck off. It’s been written up in a bunch of major news outlets and the discourse is now aflutter on the tweeting machine.

Mark Horowitz @markhoro

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The idea that the chemical imbalance is a straw man argument of little consequence cannot explain why a million people have read the Conversation article bit.ly/3B8tIMy or driven the paper into the top 700 papers ever shared (out of 21 million) go.nature.com/3OwzRoH

Mark Horowitz @markhoro

The main criticism of our paper has been that the ‘serotonin hypothesis’ (or chemical imbalance) is a straw man argument. But for the public this explanation has been no straw man but something that has guided the direction of their choices, health and lives.

Lucy Johnstone 💙 @ClinpsychLucy

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Extraordinary. To be clear: no one is denying the reality of distress, or benefits of drugs for some. We’re correcting a decades-long public disinformation campaign, with damaging impacts on prescribing rates, informed consent, & willingness to address known psychosocial causes.