Critical Psychiatry Textbook, Chapter 1: Why a Critical Textbook of Psychiatry?

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Editor’s Note: Over the next several months, Mad in America is publishing a serialized version of Peter Gøtzsche’s book, Critical Psychiatry Textbook. In this blog, he introduces the book. Each Monday, a new section of the book is published, and all chapters are archived here.

Students of medicine, psychology and psychiatry, and allied health professions learn about psychiatry by reading psychiatric textbooks. They generally believe what they read and reproduce it at their exams. It is therefore very important that the information conveyed in psychiatric textbooks is correct.

And that is the problem. There is a huge divide between the official psychiatric narrative and what the science shows. Much of what leading psychiatrists say and write about the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses; the causes of psychiatric disorders; if they can be seen in a brain scan or brain chemistry; and what the benefits and harms are of psychiatric drugs, electroshock, and forced treatment is incorrect. This has been extensively documented by critical psychiatrists and others.1-11

The discrepancy between opinion and science is also prevalent in psychiatric textbooks. Coming generations of healthcare professionals will therefore learn a lot during their studies that is demonstrably incorrect, to the detriment of their patients. This is why a critical textbook of psychiatry is needed.

Photo of a magnifying glass sitting on an open textbookMore than in any other specialty, psychiatry is a discipline where it is of utmost importance to listen to the patients, which is the basis for the diagnostic system. But when the issue is their own practice, psychiatrists are rarely willing to listen even though the general public has experienced that psychiatry, as it is currently practised, does more harm than good.

A survey of 2,031 Australians showed that people thought that antidepressants, antipsychotics, electroshock, and admission to a psychiatric ward were more often harmful than beneficial.12 The social psychiatrists who had done the survey were dissatisfied with the answers and argued that people should be trained to arrive at the “right opinion.”

But were they wrong? I don’t think so. As I shall show in this book, their views are in accordance with the most reliable scientific information we have.

We have a situation where the “customers,” the patients and their relatives, do not agree with the “salespeople,” the psychiatrists. When this is the case, the providers are usually quick to change their products or services, but this doesn’t happen in psychiatry, which has a monopoly on treating patients with mental health issues, with family doctors as their complacent frontline sales staff that do not ask uncomfortable questions about what they are selling.

You might wonder who I am and why you should trust me rather than the psychiatrists who write textbooks. Well, it is not a question of trust but about who has the most valid arguments. That is up to you to decide. I have tried to help you by documenting carefully why I conclude that some statements in the textbooks are wrong and by dissecting research to explain why some research papers are more reliable than others.

Sound and unprejudiced debate about essential issues in psychiatry is rare. When defenders of the status quo do not have valid counterarguments against criticism of their practices, they do not respond to the criticism but attack their opponent’s credibility instead.7 If you ask questions to your teachers based on this book or other books6-8 or scientific articles I have written, you might be fobbed off with replies like, “Gøtzsche? Never heard about him” (even though they know who I am), “Don’t waste your time on him,” “Is professor Gøtzsche a psychiatrist? Has he ever managed psychiatric patients? How can he judge what we do?” Or they will say that “Gøtzsche is an anti-psychiatrist,” which is the ultimate pseudo-argument psychiatrists use.7 (page 16)

You should not accept such replies, but always ask for the evidence.

Apart from this, I think I have the necessary credentials for criticising psychiatry. I am likely the only Dane who has published more than 75 papers in “the big five” (BMJ, Lancet, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine and New England Journal of Medicine) and my scientific works have been cited over 150,000 times. I am a specialist in internal medicine and have worked in many specialties, including cardiology, endocrinology, haematology, hepatology, gastroenterology, infectious diseases, and rheumatology.

I have done research in psychiatry since 2007 and have uploaded my credentials in relation to this specialty on my website, scientificfreedom.dk (see under About, Staff). Briefly, I have had five PhD students in psychiatry; have been an expert witness in seven psychiatric court cases in seven countries; have received 12 awards or other academic honours; have published nine books or book chapters; have published 30 papers in medical journals with peer review and 128 other papers; and have given over 200 lectures at meetings and courses.

It took me years of close study to find out that the bottom line of psychiatry is that it does more harm than good,1,5-8 which is also what the general public tells us.12 This makes the specialty unique, and the term “psychiatric survivor” says it all.8 In no other medical specialty do some patients call themselves survivors in the sense that they survived despite being exposed to that specialty. They fought hard to find their way out of a system that is rarely helpful, and which many survivors have described as psychiatric imprisonment, or a facility where there is a door in, but not a door out.

In other medical specialties, the patients are grateful that they survived because of the treatments their doctors applied to them. We have never heard of a cardiology survivor or an infectious disease survivor. If you survive a heart attack, you are not tempted to do the opposite of what your doctor recommends, but in psychiatry, as you will see in this book, you might die or get permanently disabled if you do what your doctor tells you to do.

Many psychiatric survivors have described how psychiatry, with its excessive use of harmful and ineffective drugs, has stolen 10 or 15 years of their life before they one day decided to take the responsibility for their life back from their psychiatrists and discovered that life is much better without drugs. They often say that what woke them up was that they read some of the books about psychiatry by psychiatrists David Healy,2 Joanna Moncrieff,3,4 or Peter Breggin,11 or by science journalist Robert Whitaker1,5 or me.6-8

In 2014, Norwegian psychiatrists wrote about what they called an “alarmingly high discontinuation” rate of psychosis pills in patients with schizophrenia, 74% in 18 months.13 The psychiatrists argued it highlighted “the clinicians’ need to be equipped with treatment strategies that optimize continuous antipsychotic drug treatment.” If the psychiatrists had listened to their patients, they would have realised that these drugs should be avoided as long-term therapy.

When students have passed their exams, they will defend tooth and nail what they have learned. It is a curious trait of human psychology that once you have made up your mind, even when you were in serious doubt, you will vigorously defend your position when someone proves that the other option was the correct one.14

University textbooks are therefore a powerful tool for indoctrination–for arriving at the “right opinion” even when it is wrong. As an example, 21 out of 36 textbooks (58%) used by students in the Netherlands that discuss brain anatomy have sections on ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) with inappropriate generalisations or ambiguous claims.15

Leading psychiatrists and their organisations rather consistently propagate misinformation in lectures, in the media, on websites, and in scientific articles.1-8 You may wonder if this is really true. Sadly, it is, but more and more critical psychiatrists have realised this and work on changing psychiatric practices. I am a member of the most important group, Critical Psychiatry Network founded by Joanna Moncrieff and based in the UK. We exchange ideas daily on an email list and discuss how we may contribute to reforming psychiatry.

In 2021, I got the idea that if I read and assessed the most commonly used textbooks in Denmark and wrote my own textbook explaining what was wrong with the other ones, this could be an eye opener for students everywhere. Danish textbooks would not be expected to be any different to those in other countries because mainstream psychiatry is the same in all countries. I hope other researchers will analyse the textbooks used in their country like I have done.

When reading books, it can be difficult to find out what is not there but should have been mentioned. Before I started reading, I therefore described in a protocol what I believe should be mentioned in psychiatric textbooks.

The pivotal issues I chose are those of obvious importance for the patients and those considered controversial, e.g. whether psychiatric disorders can be seen in a brain scan. The subheadings in my protocol were causes of psychiatric disorders, diagnoses, drug benefits, drug harms, withdrawal of psychiatric drugs, stigmatisation, informed consent, psychotherapy and other psychosocial interventions, and electroshock. As there are hundreds of psychiatric diagnoses, I focused on psychosis, depression, bipolar, ADHD, anxiety disorders, and dementia.

I identified the five psychiatric textbooks in Denmark most commonly used by medical and psychology students and evaluated if the information presented about causes, diagnosis, and treatment was adequate, correct, and based on reliable evidence. The textbooks were in Danish, had a total of 2,969 pages, and were published between 2016 and 2021.16-20

The authors included some of the most prominent Danish professors of psychiatry, but the textbooks were far from being evidence-based. They often contradicted the most reliable evidence; various author groups sometimes provided contradictory messages even within the same book; and the way they used references was insufficient. It was my clear impression that the more implausible the claims, the less likely they were referenced.

The worst book in terms of the prevalence of seriously misleading or erroneous statements did not have a single literature reference, and all the editors and authors were psychiatrists.18 The other four books had a bibliography at the end of each chapter, but often with no connection to the text. I therefore needed to guess which of the references were relevant for the statements made, if any. Sometimes, there was just a name of a person and a year in the text, with no corresponding article or book in the bibliography. In such cases, I tried to find the relevant reference in a literature search on PubMed.

Two textbooks were more truthful than the other three. In one, a psychologist was one of the two editors,17 and the other book had mostly psychologists as authors.20

I have added a page number to the textbook references and often also to references to other books to show where the information can be found. Thus,17:919 means page 919 in that textbook (or, in a few cases, 1-2 pages further ahead, when the information appeared over several pages).

Psychotropic drugs were developed based on rat experiments and selected if they disrupted the rat’s normally functioning brain.7:229,21 The pills don’t cure us, they simply change us by causing a wide array of effects in people, like all brain-active substances do, including street drugs. And they are not in any way targeted. There is nothing particularly selective about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). This term was invented by SmithKline Beecham to give paroxetine an advantage over other drugs, but it was adopted by all companies.2 There are serotonin receptors throughout the body, and the drugs have many other effects than increasing serotonin, e.g. they can affect dopamine and noradrenaline transmission and can have anticholinergic effects.22 The drugs don’t even target depression. It is therefore not surprising that a Cochrane review found that alprazolam, an old benzodiazepine, performed better than placebo for depression and similarly to tricyclic depression pills.23

Psychiatric drugs work more or less in the same way, either by suppressing emotional reactions so that people get numbed and pay less attention to significant disruptions in their lives, or by stimulating them.2,5,21

I shall therefore avoid the conventional nomenclature for drugs. It is misleading to call pills used for depression “antidepressants” and pills used for psychosis “antipsychotics.” These drugs are not “anti-” some disease.7:227 The “anti-” also gives an association to antibiotics, which save lives, but psychiatric drugs do not save lives; they take many lives.7:307 Furthermore, unlike antibiotics, they do not have disease-specific properties.3,4,7,24

I therefore talk about depression pills and psychosis pills, which do not give any false promises. If we want to reform psychiatry, we will first of all need to change the psychiatric narrative and part of that narrative is the semantics. For the same reason, I shall speak about drug harms and not drug side effects, which is a euphemism, as side effects are sometimes pleasant.

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To see the list of all references cited, click here.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

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20 COMMENTS

  1. Yes! Thank you very much! I really appreciate your dedication to real science, documentation and accountability. I like that you want to include that in your book.

    Please help me. I am confused by your explanation about the numbers you add to the text.

    “I have added a page number to the textbook references and often also to references to other books to show where the information can be found. Thus,17:919 means page 919 in that textbook (or, in a few cases, 1-2 pages further ahead, when the information appeared over several pages).”

    You say what 919 means. It means the page number. But what does the 17 mean, in 17:919?
    What do numbers mean that do not have a colon in the middle? Such as the numbers at the end of your sentence here?
    “they do not have disease-specific properties.3,4,7,24”

    I think it take’s incredible courage and I applaud you for the work you are doing. Thank you so very much!
    The psychiatric survivors need people with credentials like yours to aide in the fight for humanity!!

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  2. I’d be surprised if Dr. Gotzsche remembers me, but years ago now, he & I had a brief email conversation. The general topic was a push in Europe, which has borne fruit in Japan, to do away with the word, “schizophrenia”, in formal medical & academic contexts…..
    Originally, “schizophrenia”, which shares an etymological root with “schism”, implied that so-called “schizophrenics” had “split off” from normal society. Something like that. After all, semantics is a playground for the pseudoscience drug racket & social control mechanism known as psychiatry. But I digress….
    So I am VERY, VERY GLAD to see Dr. Gotzsche’s work here…. I have carefully read his piece above, and I endorse it 100%.
    DR. GOTZSCHE SPEAKS FOR ME….
    DR. GOTZSCHE SPEAKS FOR ME!
    DR. GOTZSCHE SPEAKS FOR ME….
    And I will do what I can, to see that his words reach the widest possible audience as fast as humanly possible…..
    Great-Uncle Dr. Peter Breggin must be proud of his nephew Dr. Peter Gotzsche!….
    I know that I sure am!
    BTW, I read Breggin’s “Toxic Psychiatry” in 1993, and have been SAVED from psychiatry since 1996. THANK GOD!….

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  3. I am very happy to majd this readable ín MIA. I’m looking forward to next chapters. It is a compliment to call someone anti-psychiatrist. Critical psychatry counts anti-psychiatry to the mainstream, nevermind. Anti-psychiatry is of may favourite topic, anyway. Psychatry is a bunch of forced treatment e. g. You are threaten to take voluntary treatment, which is alsó involuntary. I read Máté Gábor’s newest book, You’re Normal

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  4. What an extremely pleasant way to start a day by reading your article. I have been waiting for that serialized version of your critical psychiatry textbook. I really dislike the idea of spending lots of state money for a narrative of helping when the actual observations contradict that story.

    Telling people publicly what they want to hear and fine tuning words to appear professional like that naming the psychotropic substances by anti-sickness labels is really hideous. Still while listening to it it feels comfortable and tempting and anyone arguing back feels non professional extremist who exaggerates things.

    “We have a situation where the “customers,” the patients and their relatives, do not agree with the “salespeople,” the psychiatrists. When this is the case, the providers are usually quick to change their products or services, but this doesn’t happen in psychiatry, which has a monopoly on treating patients with mental health issues, with family doctors as their complacent frontline sales staff that do not ask uncomfortable questions about what they are selling.”

    I’d give those words a lot more attention, because they might well be a root cause for psychiatry becoming the current always compassionately smiling monster. If a customer is not a real customer, but forced to buy something it is easy to see that those motivations lead into science that is focused on goals of someone else than a customer. What is not as easy to see is the scale of that and how much it has twisted the common reality.

    Do you have any ideas how to correct that motivation? One of my favorite ideas is to force the salary of professionals in those cases where customer cannot choose to relate to the daily happiness of those under their care. That way use of involuntary force could still be allowed which is important for those politicians who believe in insanity defense in courts.

    It horrifies me that this monetary motivation problem is not unique to psychiatry. Many young children who cannot live with their parents and elderly people live in similar places that have been formed without proper guiding invisible hand of free markets. One day we all lose our youth and we are at the mercy of others. Mostly in quite similar conditions as psychiatric patients. You can be a psychiatric survivor or professor of psychiatry for forty years and then you have a similar destiny with forced antipsychotics and anti-epileptic drugs.

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  5. Dr Gotzsche, I look forward to reading your book. A brief remark, though – the above article says, ‘has published more than 75 papers in “the big five”’, and in the next paragraph, ‘have published 30 papers in medical journals with peer review’. Are the Big Five not medical journals with peer review then?!

    Also, it says ‘my scientific works have been cited over 150,000 times’, but on your profile at the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry (https://cepuk.org/members/) it says 15,000 times. There’s quite a difference between 150,000 and 15,000. Maybe it’s just because I like math but this kind of thing makes me suspicious. It makes it look as if you’re making these numbers up, or at least inflating them. It might be helpful to clarify those things.

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  6. Re: Dr. Gotzsche’s, “If we want to reform psychiatry, we will first of all need to change the psychiatric narrative and part of that narrative is the semantics.”

    Dr. Gotzsche is so right. Propagandists, politicians and the advertising industry have long known that to control the words people associate with a topic, is to control what people think about that topic. Hence, U.S. conservative politicians call inheritance taxes “death taxes”; a past U. S president called the desperate people trying to enter this country “rapists and murderers.”

    It is obvious that someone attempting to clarify why reasonable taxes on inherited wealth are sensible, would not call such taxes “death taxes.” To do so would be to concede the argument from the start. Similarly, attempting to realistically describe those trying to enter the country illegally, while still referring to them collectively as “rapists and murderers” is both contrary to reality and self-defeating.

    Yet we refer to emotional and mental problems under the associated rubrics of “mental health” and “mental illness.” This concedes to psychiatry precisely the “emotional/mental problems as medical illness” premise which it has failed to prove, and on which the edifice of modern psychiatry rests.

    What a gift this is to biological psychiatry. But we don’t stop there. We still refer to DSM-defined “disorders” – schizophrenia, depression etc. – despite the fact that ten years ago, Thomas Insel, then Director of NIMH, acknowledged that the DSM lacked validity. Dr. Insel’s mandate, that NIMH-funded research not be based on DSM’s diagnostic framework, is still in effect.

    These concessions to psychiatry are like arguing that the emperor has no clothes, while still referring to the wrinkles in his pants, the missing buttons on his shirt and his leaky rain coat.

    It is hard to call out psychiatry without using the “mental health” and DSM frameworks. Psychiatry and PhARMA spend more on PR than on research; wholesale rejection of their terminology in pieces such as Dr. Getzsche’s invites both media and the public to tune them out.

    Dr. Gotzsche makes a prudent start, calling “antidepressants,” “depression drugs.” But we need to start now, in separate articles, letters to the editors and public statements, to persistently call attention to the increasing evidence that the “mental health” industry uses made-up language to divert public and scientific attention from real human mental/emotional problems, and the real things that can be done about them.

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  7. I wish Dr.Peter Gotzsche was equally famous and followed here in India.He has given us invaluable insights into how psychiatry and DSM modus operandi.He is one of the best watch dog that we have in the field of psychiatry.

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  8. I am a practising MBBS doctor in india and I have been on various psychotropic drugs well over 15 years.I would surely vouch for Dr.Gotzsche’s claims of the ineffectiveness of these medicines from different classes.i have just gone slipping down the socioeconomic and professional ladder despite being fully compliant with the prescribed drugs.So what are we/I supposed to do? It’s become more of giving few medicines to an end-of-life patient.For symptom relief.A palliative therapy so to be more specific.

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  9. Hello Prof Gøtzsche,

    I enjoy reading your articles very much.
    Regarding the education in medicine, by chance I read a recent thesis of a French doctorate which was submitted in January this year. It states:

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    Selon une métanalyse réalisée en 2016 (44), ainsi qu’une étude sur l’efficacité et la tolérance des traitements antidépresseurs chez la population adolescente (45), il n’a pas été retrouvé de différence significative sur l’incidence de pensée ou acte suicidaire entre placebo et population sous antidépresseurs, cependant ils concluent qu’il est préférable d’appliquer le principe de précaution et de pratiquer une surveillance systématique en début de traitement.

    44. Sharma T, Guski LS, Freund N, Gøtzsche PC. Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports. BMJ. 27 janv 2016;352:i65.

    45. Cipriani A, Zhou X, Del Giovane C, Hetrick SE, Qin B, Whittington C, et al. Comparative efficacy and tolerability of antidepressants for major depressive disorder in children and adolescents: a network meta-analysis. Lancet Lond Engl. 27 août 2016;388(10047):881‐90.
    *****

    It said also, for example:

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    Les effets indésirables des ISRS sont nombreux, en voici une liste non-exhaustive :
    – Levée inhibition psychomotrice avec risque suicidaire à J10-15
    – Inversion de l’humeur avec apparition d’épisodes maniaques à 3-4 semaines
    *****
    (Reference is not clear there except that the picture of neurons which explain how SSRI work in the brain, is provided by a pharmaceutical company.)

    It is not the first time to see these arguments by referring your paper. We can find these arguments everywhere and almost all the medical professionals repeat them in France. I wonder where they come from. The great hint may be your article “Psychiatry textbooks”. What I want to tell you that your paper seems the justification of the arguments for doctors. What do you think about it? Do you have any idea?

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