The Truth About Antidepressants

I spoke with Dr Anders Sørensen about the overpathologisation of distress, antidepressants, withdrawal, and the medicalisation of human suffering in the latest Beyond Gender podcast. Episode #72

Watch here:

The public conversation about psychiatric medication is shifting. Over the past few years, large numbers of people have begun openly discussing the emotional flattening, dependency, withdrawal symptoms, sexual dysfunction, and cognitive effects associated with psychiatric medications. The “chemical imbalance” story has publicly unravelled. Major newspapers now regularly run stories questioning overprescribing, adolescent mental health diagnoses, therapy culture, and the medicalisation of ordinary life.

For years now, I have been writing about the tendency within modern therapeutic culture to reinterpret ordinary human suffering through increasingly medicalised, diagnostic, and identity-based frameworks. Whether the subject is childhood distress, depression, anxiety, or gender dysphoria, the pattern is remarkably similar. First, difficult emotions are elevated into fixed identities or disorders. Then a professional class emerges to diagnose, affirm, treat, and manage those identities. Finally, any attempt to ask broader psychological, developmental, familial, or cultural questions is reframed as cruelty, while dissent is quickly silenced.

I was particularly interested in speaking with clinical psychologist Dr Anders Sørensen, author of Crossing Zero: The Art and Science of Coming Off - and Staying Off - Psychiatric Drugs because the issue of tapering requires far more public discussion and clinical scrutiny than it currently receives. Sørensen belongs to a growing group of what might loosely be called “critical psychiatrists” or “critical mental health professionals” - clinicians who are increasingly concerned by the overpathologisation of ordinary distress, the expanding reach of psychiatric diagnosis, and the casual long-term prescribing of powerful medications.

If that sounds familiar, it should - the similarities between critical psychiatristry and gender critical psychiatry makes perfect sense once you notice that many of the arguments now emerging around antidepressants, psychiatric withdrawal, informed consent, and diagnostic inflation strongly resemble the debates that have unfolded around gender medicine over the past decade.

In both cases people arrive in clinics already armed with a diagnostic narrative that has been heavily influenced by public discourse. Clinicians feel pressured to affirm rather than investigate. Distress is interpreted through a narrow biomedical lens while developmental, psychological, relational, and social dimensions are spoken about but largely discounted. Any attempt to question the narrative can result in accusations of stigma, cruelty, or a lack of understanding. Both systems can also create powerful dependency loops where it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the original distress from the treatment itself.

At the same time, many people insist these medicalised frameworks saved their lives, even while others feel the treatments caused more harm than they resolved. This tension becomes especially complicated when the effects of the treatment itself are mistaken for evidence of the original condition.

I reckon the most important aspect of my conversation with Dr Sørensen was the common confusion between relapse and withdrawal. When a person stops antidepressants, they may experience terror, panic, insomnia, emotional volatility, depersonalisation, or despair, and both patient and clinician often conclude that the “underlying illness” has returned. The drugs therefore appear vindicated. The patient goes back on the medication. Psychiatry congratulates itself on correctly identifying a chronic disorder.

Except withdrawal itself can produce precisely these symptoms and what is often interpreted as proof of chronic mental illness may, in some cases, be the physiological consequences of coming off the drug itself.

This issue is increasingly being discussed within mainstream psychiatry and medicine, although the pushback against critics of overmedicalisation can be severe and deeply dismissive. Nevertheless, tapering protocols are gaining visibility because many patients discovered that the conventional “cut down over two weeks” advice was wholly inadequate. Rapid tapering often leaves people believing they cannot function without the medication, pushing them back onto the drugs and leaving them fearful of ever attempting to come off them again.

Dr Sørensen and I speak about how we now live in a culture where huge numbers of people understand themselves primarily through diagnostic language. Despite the enormous expansion of therapy, diagnosis, and medication, we do not appear to be producing a more resilient population. Indeed, many young people are simultaneously becoming more therapeutically saturated and psychologically fragile, raising serious questions about whether these interventions are working as intended.

Although many people believe money is the primary driver of diagnostic inflation, I think the helping professions usually begin with humane intentions. Most therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors genuinely want to alleviate suffering. However, the desire to help can also make it difficult to tolerate failure, uncertainty, ambiguity, limitation, or ordinary human pain. Inadvertently, this can create even more distress.

Once a medical framework becomes cloaked in certainty, ordinary clinical caution starts being treated as hostility. The clinician who asks whether distress might have developmental, relational, familial, or psychological roots is not viewed as thoughtful or thorough, but as vaguely dangerous. And yet asking difficult questions is exactly what good clinicians are supposed to do.

Some forms of suffering are meaningful and need to be analysed so that we can improve our lives or else figure out a way to endure the pain. Some symptoms are responses to life circumstances that can change. Some of us need support, stability, purpose, boundaries, community, maturity, or time more than we need a diagnostic label. While some treatments genuinely help, others can trap people inside an identity organised around permanent fragility.

None of this means psychiatric medication has no place. Antidepressants can absolutely help some people, and psychiatric intervention can sometimes be imperative. But every field must contain the ability to question itself. Every professional culture develops blind spots, particularly when emotional, moral, and financial incentives all begin pulling in the same direction.

We should be wary when there are approved doctrines, approved phrases, approved identities, and approved heretics. Something has gone wrong when a clinician risks finding themselves hauled before the digital equivalent of a village tribunal for the crime of asking a follow-up question.

The rise in fluent therapeutic jargon among children and young people is startling. Even before they understand basic human nature, many youths routinely reinterpret heartbreak, grief, insecurity, loneliness, and confusion as clinical disorders requiring expert management. We seem to have produced a generation capable of describing their symptoms in exquisite detail while often feeling more helpless than ever.

Perhaps this is the paradox at the centre of modern therapeutic culture. The helping professions usually begin with humane intentions. Most therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors genuinely want to alleviate suffering. But our discomfort with uncertainty, limitation, failure, and ordinary human pain can sometimes lead us to medicalise experiences that previous generations simply recognised as part of life.

Watch our conversation here: