Psychiatry Needs to Quit its Drug Habit

Dr. Michael Browne is a psychologist who has spent 25 years in private practice in Minneapolis and an adjunct University of Minnesota faculty member who supervises psychiatric residents learning to conduct therapy.

About five years ago, he was asked to give a talk about mental health issues to residents training to be family practice doctors. In preparation, he started reading research on antidepressants. "I was just completely astounded by what I found," he explains. "The claims for the effectiveness of antidepressants were greatly exaggerated. I looked closely at the evidence, and it's not there."

Trained as an experimental psychologist at Indiana University, Browne went on to write and lecture critically about the mental health industry's growing dependence on antidepressants. His most recent paper, "The Medicalization of Emotional Distress and the Future of Psychotherapy," argues that the mental health profession needs to kick its drug habit, and lays out half a dozen reasons why that will be tough.


I wrote a couple of papers about the subject, and I just kept pulling in more information. And I found that the evidence was exaggerated not just for antidepressants, but for virtually every single psychiatric medication. I talked to colleagues, and their reaction was, "Well, it can't be that bad. They wouldn't be giving out all of these drugs if they didn't work."

As it turns out, and I say this based on looking very carefully at the research: These drugs have little or no effectiveness. They simply don't help that much. You can always point to individual patients who will say that any treatment is wonderful, it's cured them. That's why people go around wearing copper bracelets. There are people who say, "I had terrible arthritis and this copper bracelet cured my arthritis."

And it's not really so surprising that these medications don't work. If a person is very seriously unhappy, and it goes on for months and months, what does that mean? That means there's something very seriously wrong in that person's life. It's not for trivial reasons. And common sense tells us it's not likely to be easy to change that.

Read a full and detailed interview with him here