Today, I wrote to the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHR) in the UK asking them to check the package inserts for all antidepressants approved in the UK and to ensure that misleading messages about the cause of depression being caused by low serotonin or “chemical imbalances” get removed in all cases.

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In an interview published in Sunday Times on 12 January 2025 (read the article here), psychiatrist professor Joanna Moncrieff explains that,

• depression is not a physical illness
• antidepressants don’t work
• there is no evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin (the chemical imbalance myth)
• it is a delusion that emotional problems can be resolved with a pill
• the real causes of mental illness are social issues
• “the idea of giving someone who’s depressed something that numbs you is uncomfortable — it’s a bit like telling someone to go and get drunk or take an opiate.”

Fluoxetine (Prozac) from Eli Lilly was the first SSRI approved for depression in children and adolescents. But it doesn’t work and it increases the risk of suicide and violence. After having reviewed Lilly’s unpublished clinical study reports, which we got from a drug agency,  psychiatrist David Healy and I concluded that fluoxetine is both unsafe and ineffective.

As we describe in our review, which can be downloaded here, essential information was missing; there were unexplained numerical inconsistencies; new outcomes appeared that were not prespecified in the trial protocol (the Texas sharpshooter fraud); rating scales and analyses were changed; the trial protocols were violated in other ways; and the efficacy outcomes were biased by differential dropouts and missing data.

The publications of the trials were seriously misleading and – with ten people who lost a child or spouse to suicide as a consequence of being prescribed a depression drug for a non-psychiatric condition – I called for retraction of the fraudulent trial reports, but to no avail.

Fluoxetine is a horrible drug that should never have been approved. But Lilly was in financial trouble and turned their drug, which they had wanted to shelve, into a blockbuster.

Lilly’s frauds are second to none. See more in my freely available book, Is psychiatry a crime against humanity?

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.

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 »