Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
The Cass Review exposed the dangers of medicalising young people without an adequate evidence base. But Britain's relationship with psychiatric diagnosis and drug treatment raises equally pressing questions. Clinical psychologist Dr Anders Sørensen challenges the overpathologization of emotional distress, warns that withdrawal effects are routinely mislabelled as relapse, and argues that patients seldom receive genuinely informed consent — themes with sharp relevance for the NHS and the post-Tavistock moment.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist and the author of Crossing Zero: The Art and Science of Coming Off — and Staying off — Psychiatric Drugs. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, he sets out a thorough critique of the psychiatric industry — not from the fringes, but from inside the profession, drawing on both clinical research and direct patient work. One of Sørensen's most significant arguments concerns the confusion between relapse and withdrawal. When a patient stops taking antidepressants and their distress returns, that experience is typically framed as evidence that they needed the medication all along. Sørensen pushes back firmly on this interpretation, explaining that what clinicians and patients alike often mistake for relapse is in fact a physiological withdrawal response — a distinction with profound consequences for how long people remain on psychiatric drugs and how honestly those drugs are presented to them in the first place. The episode also takes on what Sørensen calls the overpathologization of distress. Depression, anxiety and other difficult emotional states, he argues, frequently make sense as responses to life circumstances — and treating them primarily as chemical imbalances to be corrected with medication can short-circuit the deeper psychological work that leads to lasting recovery. This view connects directly to the conclusions of the Cass Review, which urged a shift away from swift medical intervention towards careful, exploratory therapeutic support, particularly for children and young people presenting with complex and layered distress. Informed consent runs through the episode as a central concern. Sørensen is direct about the gap between what patients are typically told about psychiatric drugs and what the evidence actually shows. Side effects, dependency risks and the genuine difficulties of coming off these medications are, he suggests, routinely downplayed. For British listeners, this will sound familiar: the same informed consent failures were identified by the Cass Review in the context of gender medicine, where patients and families were given insufficient information about experimental treatments, long-term outcomes and the full range of alternative pathways available to them. Sørensen also introduces the concept of hyperbolic tapering — a method of reducing psychiatric drug dosages that follows the way these substances actually bind to receptors in the brain, rather than using the blunter linear schedules standard in most NHS guidance. Coming off medication safely, he explains, may require a far slower and more carefully managed process than is commonly acknowledged, and patients deserve to know that before they begin. For British clinicians, commissioners and patients navigating a mental health system under significant pressure, this episode offers a rigorous and candid perspective. The questions Sørensen raises — about how distress is categorised, how drugs are prescribed and withdrawn, and how patients are supported to make genuinely informed choices — are not abstract. They are live questions inside the NHS, and they connect directly to the wider reckoning about whether medication is always the right first response to human suffering.
