Joanna Moncrieff

Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and academic. She is Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London and a leading figure in the Critical Psychiatry Network. Her books ''The Myth of the Chemical Cure'' and ''The Bitterest Pills'' are central texts in the critical psychiatry movement. She is critical of mainstream psychiatry's medical approach to mental illness. She has stated that while she does prescribe drugs to her patients sometimes, she is "not convinced that antidepressants have any use" and that there's a need "to find more non-medical ways of supporting people through crises".

Moncrieff argues against what she calls the "disease-centred" model of psychiatric drug action, where the drugs are hypothesized to correct for an abnormality and therefore restore normal functioning (similar to how insulin is given for diabetes). Instead, she has proposed that a "drug-centred" model better explains their effects, where the drugs themselves actually cause abnormal states or alterations which coincidentally relieve symptoms (similar to how alcohol's disinhibiting effect may relieve social phobia, but doesn't "correct" for a chemical imbalance). Provided by Wikipedia