If people reach a certain level of distress/impairment (which can be easily measured) they should be entitled to support, without having that impairment first medicalised, pathologised, depoliticised & stigmatised. Being medicalised shouldn't be a precondition for receiving care.

'The secret of happiness: find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it'.
- Daniel Dennett (who passed today)

The neurofication of everyday life, aside from fuelling a global psych-drug market, is driving young people to reframe various forms of real distress & difficulty as indicating fixed disabilities, that neither they nor anyone else can change. This is debilitating a generation.

My letter published in The Guardian today👇: “By misrepresenting socially caused distress as a medical issue, we run the risk of wrongly individualising, pathologising & depoliticising that distress, & so exonerating social conditions from responsibility.”theguardian.com/politics/2024/…

'People need to be understood as wholes'

Has anyone had a close look at NICE approval for daridorexant? seems not to affect sleep onset, small effect wanes after several months, NICE first rejected it.

New RCT about intranasal ketamine in suicidal patients with unipolar depression.
Main outcome: reduction in suicide ideation, 24h. No significant effect.
clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03539…
Cannot access the publication, unfortunately
psychiatrist.com/jcp/ketamine-a…

Looking forward to talking at this Health Innovation Network meeting on how to safely stop antidepressants on the 21st of May

Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction is commonly misunderstood, even by people who experience it.

The following infograph should help explain #PSSD to those who are not familiar with it.

A note of caution from psychiatrist, author and researcher Dr Joanna Moncrieff: 'As with so many other medical treatments, they have become popular through the potent mixture of financial interests and desperation.' Psychedelics – the new psychiatric craze! buff.ly/2WPZyvC

One to sign up for- up and coming talk this week from advocate Kim Witczak Kim Witczak 💜 on America's broken drug safety system.

mailchi.mp/consilium-scie…

John Cromby's review questions the premises of this critique of the 'pathological paradigm' madintheuk.com/2024/04/empire…

There could be at least 230,000 US citizens and 40,000 UK citizens with permanent #PSSD . This is a conservative estimate and doesn’t factor in those who used to take SSRIs / SNRIs but don’t currently. madintheuk.com/2023/05/antide…

Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death
by Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD

Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. Why have we allowed this drug pandemic to continue?
madinamerica.com/2024/04/prescr…

Surely it’s less an ‘increased public awareness' of a neurodivergent/psych condition that leads to higher diagnostic rates, and more an increased public tendency to reframe experience in terms of such conditions that leads to higher diagnostic rates.

Dizzy or clumsy on meds? We need your input on treatment induced PPPD ( Persistent Postural Perceptual Dizziness) Please fill in a RxISK Report to let us know about dizziness, imbalances, clumsiness and lack of co-ordination in as much detail as you can.rxisk.org/balancing-our-…

Sedated Dr James Davies (PhD) 💭 is brilliant. As so often with good books it puts into words questions that you have half formulated in yr own head but have neither skill nor knowledge to articulate. V clear and lively writing that even I (no scientific background) could easily follow.

Research Assistant: tiny.cc/DIAMOND_RA
Postdoc Researcher - Health Services Research: tiny.cc/DIAMOND_HSR
Postdoc Researcher - Data Analytics: tiny.cc/DIAMOND_DA
Research Fellow: tiny.cc/DIAMOND_RF

Please get in touch if interested and you have any questions.

Messing about with the brain: a response to commentaries on ‘Depression: why electricity and drugs are not the answer’ | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core - bit.ly/49FkzZe

Looking forward to talking to The Therapeutics Initiative Therapeutics Initiative about antidepressant withdrawal effects and safe deprescribing