In this report, we explain that the mental health system’s standard treatments are colossally counterproductive and harmful, often forced on unwilling patients. The overreliance on psychiatric drugs is reducing the recovery rate and life expectancy of people diagnosed with serious mental illness dramatically. Psychiatric incarceration, euphemistically called “involuntary commitment,” is similarly counterproductive and harmful, adding to patients’ trauma and massively associated with suicides. Harmful psychiatric interventions are being imposed on people without consideration of the facts about treatments and their harms, and are a violation of International Law.

We published our report on 18 September 2023 and I now republish it.

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What knocked me over was one of the worst show trials in academic history

By Peter C Gøtzsche
Translation of my article in the newspaper Politiken 2024;Dec 2

In the Danish newspaper Politiken (25 Nov), Lars Igum Rasmussen brought a comprehensive portrait of me because of my 75th birthday the next day. Most of the article is laudatory, but already in the headline Lars Igum gets it wrong: “Peter Gøtzsche was one of the greatest. Until his manners knocked him off the throne.”

What knocked me over was one of the worst show trials in academic history, which I have written two books and also an article in Politiken about: “My dismissal is a scientific judicial murder” (11 Dec 2018). I was elected to Cochrane’s Governing Board with the largest number of votes to change Cochrane’s disastrous course, but it became too much of a threat to Cochrane’s CEO, who, by the way, suddenly disappeared without any explanation in the middle of a month after he had destroyed Cochrane. …

What really happened to Peter Gøtzsche?Read More »

Also called complementary medicine, there is no commonly accepted definition of alternative medicine which might delineate a logical boundary to other treatments. Most definitions say it is not presently considered part of conventional medicine. That could be translated into: It does not work. If it worked, doctors would be happy to use it – and would not call it alternative.

Alternative medicine is no alternative is chapter 13 in my book, Survival in an overmedicated world: look up the evidence yourself. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2019, which has been published in 7 languages; Danish, Dutch, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. Read the chapter here.

Some people with asthma are allergic to house dust mites, and many physical and chemical methods have been tried to eradicate the mites or reduce their occurrence. One of my researchers, Cecilia Hammarquist from Sweden, wanted to review the trials, which we did.

This is a hilarious story illustrating that there are no limits to stupidy and dishonesty in healthcare. Read it here.

My article illustrates the importance of having access to documents in the public administration and a shocking degree of torturing the data till they confess committed by civil servants. Health checks don’t work but are popular with politicians, and the rest follows from there.

One of the most absurd interventions in healthcare is distant healing, which includes prayer.  We have shown that a Cochrane review of intercessory prayer[1] goes beyond reason, is logically inconsistent, and uses an unsound mixture of theological and scientific arguments,[2] which led to utter nonsense. …

Cochrane review of intercessory prayer: a pillar of shame for CochraneRead More »

Translation from Norwegian

Every crown goes directly to expenses related to the trial.

The money collected goes directly to cover the costs of a court case against the state for human rights violations. The trial starts on 19 November in Oslo District Court.

Survivor of forced psychiatry sues the state for violation of human rights

For the first time, the state, represented by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, is sued for human rights violations in relation to forced psychiatric treatment in Norway. This case is the first to come before the court from ICJ-Norway’s (the Norwegian branch of the International Commission of Jurists) pro bono group for human rights cases related to coercion in mental health care. …

Support historic trial about human rights violations in psychiatryRead More »

In 2013, I published the book, Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care, which won the British Medical Association’s Annual Book Award in 2014, in the category Basis of Medicine. It has appeared in 18 languages.

In 2014, I lectured about drugs in Santa Rosa in California at Dr. John McDougall’s weekend course. John made three interviews with me before I left, and the one about organised crime has been seen by over one million people. John died in 2024, and as I don’t know what will happen to his YouTube channel, I have now uploaded the interview here.

Af Professor emeritus Peter C Gøtzsche og psykolog Allan Holmgren

(Nedenstående er vores debatindlæg, som Politiken ikke ville udgive)

I Politiken (21. august) kommer folketingsmedlem Matilde Powers (S) med et væld af forkerte påstande om ADHD.

Hun kalder ADHD en biologisk forstyrrelse i hjernen med en nedsat virkning af signalstofferne dopamin og noradrenalin. Man har aldrig kunnet påvise, at personer med en ADHD-diagnose har anderledes hjerner end andre, hverken på scanninger eller kemisk. ADHD er ikke andet end et navn, man har givet personer med en vis adfærd, som mange af os har. Når man bruger de diagnostiske spørgsmål på kursusdeltagere, får mellem en tredjedel og halvdelen diagnosen! …

ADHD er en epidemi af falske diagnoser og skadelig medicinRead More »

On 30 August, I shall publish my new book, which from that date can be downloaded for free on this website. The book is a frontal attack on biological psychiatry, which is extremely harmful for the patients. See the press release. This is the first page in the book (I have removed the hyperlinks in the references):

1 Psychiatry is in crisis

We have a mental health crisis. The existing approaches that focus on drugs are not working. In the UK, mental health disability has almost trebled in recent decades, and the gap in life expectancy between people with severe mental health issues and the general population has doubled.[1] The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations have therefore recently called for systematic mental health reform emphasising psychosocial interventions.[2]

In 2019, a Norwegian study found that 52 of 100 consecutively admitted patients to a psychiatric hospital would have wanted a drug-free alternative if it had existed.[3] As I shall demonstrate in this book, psychosocial interventions are clearly better than drugs. Why can’t people get that then?

According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, it is unethical to subject patients to forced treatment.[4] There is a high risk that forced treatment is being used to benefit staff in making their work less stressful. In Europe, oversight comes under the convention prohibiting torture, and a committee has observed that deliberate ill-treatment of patients in psychiatric institutions still occurs.[5] Moreover, fundamental components of psychosocial rehabilitative treatment are underdeveloped or absent, and treatment consists essentially of drugs.

I have studied psychiatry closely for 17 years. I have published many scientific articles and several books,[6] given numerous lectures and interviews, and have been an expert witness in court cases about forced treatment or psychiatric drug harms in Brazil, Canada, USA, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Australia and New Zealand.

This book summarises what I have written before and contains a lot of new material as well. I include many debates I have had with psychiatrists to help historian and filmmaker Janus Bang who wants to write a biography about me, and I think these additions will be of general interest, as psychiatrists reason in the same way everywhere.

Undoubtedly, some will find the book’s title provocative, but if you read the book, you can decide for yourself if you agree that psychiatry is a crime against humanity.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7, crimes against humanity refer to specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality.[7]

Crimes against humanity have often been committed as part of State policies. Prohibited acts include murder, imprisonment, torture, persecution against an identifiable group, and inhumane acts intentionally causing severe mental suffering or serious bodily injury.

State policies may lead to persecution of psychiatric patients. These patients have often described forced treatment as imprisonment and torture, and they have reported that their ill-treatment is sometimes deliberate. It is also a fact that State policies, in the form of clinical guidelines, may lead to much loss of life.

I have shown that psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death.[8] Depression drugs are the major killer, which is because so many elderly people take them. The pills double the risk of falls and hip fractures in a dose-dependent manner,[9] and within a year after a hip fracture, about one-fifth of the patients will be dead.

Doctors and drug regulators are surprisingly unconcerned about all these deaths. When patients die, doctors usually blame their illness rather than the drug or their own incompetence, or they simply don’t know it was a drug death, e.g. if a patient becomes dizzy, falls, breaks a hip, and dies as a result. In contrast, airline pilots are critically concerned with our safety because if we go down, they do too.[10]

[1] Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024;May.

[2] Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024;May.

[3] Heskestad, Stig, et al. (2019). Medikamentfri psykiatrisk behandling – hva mener pasientene? Tidsskr Nor Legeforen 139. doi: 10.4045/tidsskr.18.0912.

[4] United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: General comment No. 1. 2014;May 19.

[5] Council of Europe. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). CPT/Inf/E (2002) 1 – Rev. 2013.

[6] Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2013; Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015; Gøtzsche PC. Mental health survival kit and withdrawal from psychiatric drugs. Ann Arbor: L H Press; 2022; Gøtzsche PC. Critical psychiatry textbook. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2022 (freely available).

[7] Crimes against humanity. Trial International.

[8] Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Mad in America 2024;April 16.

[9] Hubbard R, Farrington P, Smith C, et al. Exposure to tricyclic and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants and the risk of hip fracture. Am J Epidemiol 2003;158:77-84 and Thapa PB, Gideon P, Cost TW, et al. Antidepressants and the risk of falls among nursing home residents. N Engl J Med 1998;339:875-82; Khanassov V, Hu J, Reeves D, van Marwijk H. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor use and risk of fractures in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry 2018;33:1688-1708.

[10] Healy D. Medical partisans? Why doctors need conflicting interests. Aust N Z J Psychiatry 2012;46:704–7.