Anders Sørensen
Clinical psychologist challenging psychiatric overreach
The Cass Review forced Britain to confront the medicalisation of vulnerable young people. Clinical psychologist Anders Sørensen extends that reckoning to psychiatry at large. He questions whether NHS patients are genuinely informed before treatment begins, and warns that a systemic misreading of drug withdrawal as relapse is distorting both clinical records and individual lives.
Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist whose work challenges some of the most entrenched assumptions in mainstream mental healthcare. His central concern — that psychiatry too readily converts ordinary human distress into diagnostic categories requiring pharmaceutical treatment — carries sharp relevance for a Britain where antidepressant prescribing reached record levels in the post-pandemic years and where overstretched GPs have often reached for medication as a practical first response to long waiting lists.
In his Beyond Gender conversation, "The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals and Informed Consent" (May 2026), Sørensen focused on a failure that sits uncomfortably close to what the Cass Review exposed in gender medicine: patients are not being given honest information before treatment begins. He argues that when withdrawal effects emerge after psychiatric drugs are reduced or stopped, clinicians routinely record them as relapse or a return of the underlying illness. The practical consequence is that patients are steered back onto — or onto higher doses of — medication, and the data informing prescribing decisions becomes systematically unreliable.
The parallel with the Tavistock scandal is pointed. Just as the Cass Review found that families were not told the true limits of the evidence base for medical gender pathways, Sørensen contends that informed consent is being undermined across a far larger NHS patient population. His position is not a wholesale rejection of psychiatric medicine but a demand for intellectual honesty: acknowledging evidential uncertainty and sharing it with patients rather than smoothing it away.
His discussion with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes, and Dr Bret Alderman on "The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals and Informed Consent" gives British listeners a framework for asking harder questions of a healthcare culture that the Cass Review has made newly accountable — not only in gender clinics, but across medicine as a whole.
