Better Thinking

In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Dr Joanna Moncrieff about her latest book: A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs: The Truth About How They Work and How to Come Off Them.Dr Joanna Moncrieff is a practising psychiatrist, part-time academic, and author with a deep interest in the history, philosophy, and politics of psychiatry. Her work focuses particularly on the use, misuse, and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs.She became interested in drug treatment because of its dominance in contemporary approaches to managing the suffering and disturbances labeled as mental disorders. She recognised that embedded in the understanding of drugs such as ‘antipsychotics’ and ‘antidepressants’ was an unexamined assumption: that these drugs ‘work’ by correcting a hypothetical abnormality or ‘chemical imbalance.’ Moncrieff has termed this the ‘disease-centred’ model of drug action and has developed an alternative ‘drug-centred’ model, which highlights the ways psychiatric drugs al