By Robert Whitaker
August 13, 2022
Source: Mad in America
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
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When Mad in America received a notice this past June that Joanna Moncrieff, Mark Horowitz, and colleagues would soon publish a paper concluding that there were no research findings that supported the low-serotonin hypothesis of depression, I initially wondered whether we should bother to report on it. Mad in America readers know well that the low-serotonin theory had long ago been debunked, with numerous articles on our site telling of that fact, and so I quipped to other MIA staff that reviewing the article would be like “beating a dead horse.”
But such is our little cocoon here at Mad in America. For much of the mainstream media, their paper made for a stunning finding. In print, radio, and television, the paper has been described as a “landmark” finding, as a “game changer” and so forth, the media telling of how it has shaken up accepted wisdom about antidepressants and “how they work.”
This was rather amusing, I thought, as the exclamations of surprise revealed the media’s utter failure regarding their reporting on psychiatry for the past decades. Their surprise served as a tacit confession that they had been publishing propaganda for some time.
Then, as psychiatrists publicly commented on the paper, a second confession appeared, this one indeed of “landmark” importance. Their comments serve as an admission that, for the past several decades, their profession committed medical fraud. And I am using that term in its legal sense.
As Moncrieff and colleagues noted, there is a long line of research that failed to find evidence supporting the low-serotonin theory of depression. What was new about their work was that they performed a comprehensive review of this research, looking at the different “types” of studies that had been done, and finding that all had failed to produce evidence supporting the theory. In response, a number of prominent psychiatrists in the UK and the United States dismissed the paper as old news. Here is a sampling:
From UK psychiatrists:
“The findings from this review are really unsurprising. Depression has lots of different symptoms and I don’t think I’ve met any serious scientists or psychiatrists who think that all causes of depression are caused by a simple chemical imbalance in serotonin.” —Michael Bloomfield, University College London (UCL)
“This paper does not present any new findings but just reports results which have been published elsewhere and it is certainly not news that depression is not caused by ‘low serotonin levels.'” —David Curtis, UCL Genetics Institute
From US psychiatrists:
“Nothing is new here. And the fuss surrounding the paper reveals much ignorance about psychiatry. The serotonin hypothesis of depression which became popular from the 1990s until now, is false, and has known to be false for a long time, and never was proven to begin with.” —Nassir Ghaemi, Tufts University School of Medicine
“When I was doing research for [my] book, I was reading the same studies that I am sure that Dr. Moncrieff and colleagues read, which were basically saying that there’s no direct evidence of a serotonin deficiency. So it’s not really new.” —Daniel Carlat, publisher of the Carlat Psychiatry Report
The psychiatrists making these comments are correct. The psychiatric research community has long known that the low-serotonin theory didn’t pan out and that, in fact, the field long ago moved on to new theories about the possible pathology that gives rise to depression.
Yet, as is easy to show, the American Psychiatric Association, in concert with pharmaceutical companies, promoted the low-serotonin theory to the public long after the low-serotonin theory had been found to be without merit. Scientific advisory councils populated by professors of psychiatry at prestigious medical schools also signed off on such pronouncements by non-profit advocacy associations, and in that manner, share culpability for telling this “falsehood” to the public.
That fraudulent story-telling worked, in the sense of deluding the public. As Moncrieff and colleagues noted, surveys in recent years found that 85% to 90% of the public believed that low serotonin was the cause of depression, and that antidepressants helped fix that imbalance.
There you have the basis for a class action lawsuit: the psychiatric community long ago knew that the low-serotonin story of depression hadn’t panned out, yet the American Psychiatric Association, pharmaceutical companies, and scientific advisory councils told the public otherwise, and this created a societal belief in that false story. The surveys prove that many millions of patients acted upon that falsehood and incorporated it into their sense of self.
How can such practices impact your health? Why? What is your experience?
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