💊 Anti-depressants: "placebos" with side effects...Chemically Imbalanced, the book everyone's talking about
A review
BOOK REVIEW: Marginally better than a placebo, emotionally numbing, with brain-altering potential effects. Welcome to anti-depressants.
This is the message from renowned psychiatrist and professor Dr Joanna Moncrieff in her recently-published, Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth HERE.
In this book she lifts the lid on anti-depressant research after doing a systematic review published in 2022 HERE, which reveals a lot of flimsiness.
Dr Moncrieff outlines how depression “medicalised misery” through an unproven hypothesis – that people with depression are lacking enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the synapses of the brain.
This theory led to creating a need for a pill to correct said serotonin levels and the medicalisation of depression.
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and the likes of Prozac were born in the 1980s
Now millions of people around the world are on them, often prescribed with little explanation of the potential side effects (or what she calls, “expected effects”), and difficulties coming off them.
In the book Dr Moncrieff describes how the serotonin “theory” has never been proven, and how SSRIs have only shown tiny improvements over a placebo.
She runs through reports on sexual dysfunction eg delayed/reduced orgasm sensations, and for some, even numbing of sexual organs. (We learn that sex offenders are actively prescribed SSRIs to lower libido).
That’s before you get to the overall emotional numbing. This means it can be difficult for some people to experience feelings of joy, excitement, enthusiasm once on them.
She goes onto describe the chronic lethargy often experienced, and sometimes year-long debilitating withdrawal symptoms.
These range from vertigo, dizziness, and nausea and “brain zaps” which some people describe. These they say are like lightening going through the brain.
We learn in the book that these drugs are not really, as expected, targeted drugs, and we don’t really know the extent of their mind-altering effects.
Even though I have heard a lot of this already – eg first from a day-long talk about the controversial SSRI theory almost 10 years ago by Kelly Brogan an outspoken US psychiatrist, Chemically Imbalanced makes shocking reading.
Worryingly, finding out that most SSRI studies have been done on humans for just a few weeks.
There is very little around what happens to the brain and people’s emotions when taking them over years – which many people now have.
Dr Moncrieff says that SSRIs are often prescribed when people are facing crisis and seldom explained properly about the down sides.
She says that most people recover from depression “spontaneously”.
To quote Moncrieff:
“They [anti-depressants] have placebo effects and they numb people’s emotions, but there are no grounds for believing that they help people in any meaningful way.”
“This situation is a scandal and it needs to be challenged because it prevents people from exercising one of the most basic rights: informed consent.”
Overall an uncomfortable read. A complicated story told with patience and passion on behalf of the patient.
The book ends with some pointers of where to go if you’re thinking of being described from SSRIs (titrating down). There’s a quick reference to exercise and walking being more effective than SSRIs at one point, no mention of diet. The book talks about alternative approaches - namely rather than medicalising depression, human kindness and understanding are needed and help through hard times and tapping into inner resources.
There’s definitely room for a practical sequel here.
Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth by Joanna Moncrieff is published by Flint Books and available HERE.
Paid subscribers to The Gut Makeover can watch my interview with Dr Joanna Moncrieff talking about her new book HERE.
Hoping it will be recorded, as I uncertain I can be there live...
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