Joanna Moncrieff

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Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and academic. She is Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London and a leading figure in the Critical Psychiatry Network. Her books The Myth of the Chemical Cure and The Bitterest Pills are central texts in the critical psychiatry movement. Moncrieff is known as the primary author of an umbrella review which found that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin. She is critical of mainstream psychiatry's medical approach to mental illness. She has stated that while she does prescribe drugs to her patients sometimes, she is "not convinced that antidepressants have any use" and that there is a need "to find more non-medical ways of supporting people through crises". Moncrieff argues against what she calls the "disease-centred" model of psychiatric drug action, where the drugs are hypothesized to correct for an abnormality and therefore restore normal functioning (similar to how insulin is given for...

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