2 March 2023 CEP provides the Secretariat for the APPG for PDD The APPG for Prescribed Drug Dependence today welcomes the publication of the NHS England Framework for Action ‘Optimising personalised care for adults prescribed medicines associated with dependence or withdrawal symptoms’. This framework is intended to encourage Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to develop and […]
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Please take a survey to help direct future research into reducing and stopping psychiatric drugs
Survey link: https://tapersafer.org/the-protect-study/indexCEP is a partner organisation of the PROTECT Study, which aims to identify research priorities for reducing and stopping psychiatric drugs. There are many unanswered questions about the process of reducing and stopping psychiatric medicines (commonly referred to as ‘tapering’) and how best to do it. We think that it is important that future research […]
Remembering Ian Singleton
CEP has recently heard the sad news that Ian Singleton, founder member of the Bristol and District Tranquilliser Project (BTP), has died. Ian had a busy job as a civil servant until he experienced severe withdrawal symptoms from benzodiazepines in the 1980s. Frustrated with the lack of support available, Ian decided to work for BTP […]
Professor John Read: Fear and Loathing in the ECT Debate
The Lack of Evidence for ECT To the surprise of many people, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is still being administered to approximately a million people a year internationally, including about 3,000 here in the UK. It involves passing enough electric current through the human brain, eight to twelve times, to cause convulsions, in the hope of […]
Please join CEP for virtual screening of Medicating Normal plus Q&A tomorrow Wed 26 Jan 7pm GMT – free and discounted tickets available: bit.ly/CEP_ADR
Join the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry and AntidepressantRisks.org for a virtual community screening of Medicating Normal, a 76-minute documentary film that follows the stories of five high-functioning people whose doctors prescribed pills to help with common problems such as stress, depression, insomnia and grief with devastating impact on their lives. It is the untold story of the serious consequences that […]
Blog: New NICE Guidelines for ECT are dangerously inadequate, say 50 patients and professionals
John Read and Chris Harrop Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is still given to approximately 2,500 people in England annually, predominantly women and older people. A course of ECT consists of 6-12 sessions in which an electric current is applied to the brain, causing a seizure. NICE Guidelines in 2003 noted that there was very limited evidence […]
Please join CEP for an online screening of the film Medicating Normal on 26 Jan 2022 7pm GMT bit.ly/CEP_ADR
Join the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry and AntidepressantRisks.org for a virtual community screening of Medicating Normal, a 76-minute documentary film that follows the stories of five high-functioning people whose doctors prescribed pills to help with common problems such as stress, depression, insomnia and grief with devastating impact on their lives. It is the untold story of the serious consequences that […]
CEP co-founder Luke Montagu writes in the Daily Mail about decision to resign from NICE committee tackling withdrawal from prescribed drugs
After eight years of campaigning for patients who’ve become dependent on their medicines, I was pleased to be asked to join a committee drawing up new official guidelines to tackle the problem in 2019. The committee was supposed to produce evidence-based recommendations for doctors and prescribers covering the safe prescribing and withdrawal of medicines that […]
£500m wasted each year in England on dependency-forming medicines
CEP and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence is releasing new research which estimates that around half a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money is wasted each year in England on medicines that can cause dependency, including antidepressants, painkillers and sleeping pills. This research follows the publication in 2019 of Public Health England’s Prescribed […]
Withdrawal case studies needed by Daily Mail
The Daily Mail Good Health section is planning to run another article on the widespread problem of drug dependency involving prescription medicines such as opioids, gabapentinoids, benzodiazepines, Z-drugs and antidepressants. The article will examine the scale of the problem and the amount spent on inappropriate prescribing. To help to tell the story and illustrate the […]