From the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, written by Peter Gøtzsche. “On 11 February 2025, Professor David Nutt published a personal view in Lancet Psychiatry, “Drug development in psychiatry: 50 years of failure and how to resuscitate it.”1 It runs over 7 pages and has 161 references.
When you see a title like this, with so many references, you think that finally, at long last, one of the prominent figures of British psychiatry has admitted what is wrong with psychiatry when it can no longer harm his career to be honest about it because of his high age.
I rejoiced too early. You cannot expect leading psychiatrists to admit that their career has been a failure and that they have harmed their patients because of their belief in biological psychiatry, which has never produced anything of value for the patients.
Instead of blaming his profession, Nutt blames what he calls anti-psychiatry lobby groups: “Unlike other branches of medicine, psychiatry is in constant battles with lobby groups that oppose its very existence as a medical speciality.”
