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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Martin Plöderl, PhD Clinical Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Salzburg, Austria Despite decades of research and more than 100,000 patients in clinical trials, it is still debated if the efficacy of antidepressants is clinically meaningful and if prescriptions are justified, given the small benefits and the harms (Jakobsen et al., 2019; Munkholm et al., 2019). Nonetheless, there is […]
This blog was originally published on 7th September 2020 on the Psychology Today website as: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-turbulent-minds/202009/should-ect-be-judged-the-standards-homeopathy —o— Extraordinarily, we now live in a world in which the best evidence [https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/treatments-and-wellbeing/ect] that the Royal College of Psychiatrists has been able to muster for the real-world effectiveness of ECT exactly parallels the claims for homeopathy. ECT is defended […]
Today I welcome the new patient information leaflet, entitled ‘Stopping Antidepressants’, published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The leaflet distills many years of work by researchers, campaigners and the prescribed harm community, which has jointly challenged previous understandings of antidepressant withdrawal as being a relatively benign experience for most people. Instead, the leaflet now […]
By Lucy Johnstone and Sue Cunliffe Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, is still given to about 2,100 -2,700 people a year in England, about half of whom have not consented to it. This blog reports on a campaign for an independent review of this highly controversial procedure, and provides links to relevant articles. There will be […]
A commentary on Read, J., Kirsch, I., & McGrath, L. (2020). Electroconvulsive therapy for depression: A review of the quality of ECT versus sham ECT trials and meta-analyses. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 21, 64-103. Richard P. Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Sheffield In a discipline to which controversy is no stranger, there are […]
The Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, secretariat of the APPG for Prescribed Drug Dependence until the end of the last parliament, wanted to provide a short update on the recent activities of the APPG. Following the publication of the PHE Prescribed Medicines Review in September last year, the APPG worked hard to secure a commitment from the […]
NICE depression guideline: cautious optimism? Susan McPherson, University of Essex This commentary is a revised and updated version of a Rapid Response letter to the BMJ in September 2019 posted prior to NICE’s decision letter of December 2019: https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l2356/rr-0 In a joint stakeholder position statement concerning the NICE 2018 draft depression guideline, six methodological issues were […]
