Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
Dr Anders Sørensen joins Stella O'Malley to challenge the assumption that emotional distress requires a psychiatric diagnosis and long-term medication. For Irish listeners navigating an overstretched mental health system, his argument — that withdrawal is routinely misread as relapse, that depression often makes sense, and that genuine informed consent is rarely offered — lands close to home. This conversation pushes back against a medical culture that reaches for pills before asking why someone is suffering.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist and the author of Crossing Zero, a book examining the evidence around psychiatric drugs and how people can come off them safely. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, he makes an argument that will be familiar to anyone who has felt that their distress was processed too quickly into a diagnosis: that psychiatry has drifted towards treating emotional pain as a chemical problem to be corrected, rather than a meaningful signal to be understood. One of Sørensen's most important contributions is his distinction between withdrawal and relapse. When a person who has been on antidepressants for years attempts to stop and their symptoms return, clinicians frequently take this as confirmation that the original diagnosis was correct and that ongoing medication is necessary. Sørensen argues that, in many cases, those returning symptoms are a feature of physiological dependence, not evidence of an underlying disorder. For the large numbers of people in Ireland currently prescribed antidepressants — and trying to make sense of what happens when they try to reduce — that distinction is far from theoretical. Informed consent sits at the heart of the episode. Sørensen's case is that patients are rarely told, before they begin, how difficult stopping can be, what the long-term evidence actually shows, or what alternatives exist. In Ireland, where a GP consultation can last ten minutes and a referral to a psychologist may mean a wait stretching well over a year, the conditions for genuinely informed decision-making are often simply not available. People accept prescriptions because they are suffering and a prescription is what is on offer. Sørensen is not making the case that psychiatric medication is without value. He is arguing that depression and distress frequently make sense — that they are responses to real circumstances and experiences that deserve to be engaged with rather than chemically dampened. That shift, from disorder to meaningful suffering, is one that psychotherapists have long advocated, and it is central to the broader argument this podcast has consistently made: that the medicalisation of human difficulty — whether through psychiatric diagnosis or clinical gender pathways — carries serious risks that are too often minimised. The episode also covers hyperbolic tapering, a slow and graduated method of reducing psychiatric medication that has a stronger evidence base than standard clinical practice in Ireland would suggest. Knowing that safer pathways off medication exist, and that patients can ask for them, is practical information with real consequences for Irish listeners. Stella brings to this conversation the perspective of a psychotherapist who works with Irish clients and knows at first hand the gaps in what this country's mental health services can offer. Sørensen arrives at the same conclusions through his own research and clinical experience. What they share is a conviction that people in distress deserve more than a label and a prescription, and that honest, evidence-based conversations about what psychiatric drugs can and cannot do are long overdue.
