S5 Episode 33: Chemically Imbalanced with Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, Psychiatrist

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a psychiatrist, professor, author, and one of the most fearless and influential thinkers in modern mental health. For over thirty years, Dr. Moncrieff has stood at the center of psychiatry, not to defend it blindly, but to question its foundations, to hold it accountable, and to tell the truth; even when the truth was inconvenient. She is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, a consultant psychiatrist in the UK’s National Health Service, and the co-founder of the Critical Psychiatry Network - a global collective of psychiatrists challenging the chemical narratives that have shaped and distorted our understanding of mental illness for decades. For years, we’ve been told that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance,” that our despair is a disorder, and that our suffering is a malfunction; but Dr. Moncrieff has spent her life asking the question most were too afraid to ask: “What if we got this wrong?” In 2022, she co-authored one of the most important studies in psychiatric history, a landmark meta-analysis that dismantled the serotonin theory of depression, revealing that the scientific basis for one of the most widely accepted explanations for mental illness simply doesn’t exist. Her latest book, Chemically Imbalanced, goes further; it doesn’t just challenge the pharmaceutical narrative; it exposes the social, political, and economic systems that have medicalized emotion and pathologized pain; and it is a call to reclaim our right to feel, to grieve, to question, and to be human without shame or sedation. Beyond the research and the resistance, Dr. Moncrieff is much more: She’s a doctor who has sat across from real people in real pain and never stopped asking what was missing from the way we care and a woman who has walked through the noise of a multi-billion-dollar industry and emerged with her conscience and her courage intact with no intent to burn it down; but to build something better.

Connect with Dr. Moncrieff:

Website - https://joannamoncrieff.com

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