Anders Sørensen
Psychiatrist and critical psychiatry advocate
Danish psychiatrist Anders Sørensen challenges the foundations of modern psychiatric practice — questioning diagnosis-led care, the routine misreading of withdrawal as relapse, and the gap between what patients are told and what the evidence actually supports. For Irish listeners navigating an overstretched mental health system, his arguments arrive with uncomfortable familiarity.
Anders Sørensen is a psychiatrist working within the tradition of critical psychiatry — a discipline that does not reject psychiatric care outright but insists on honest scrutiny of its assumptions, its evidence base, and the quality of information offered to patients before they begin treatment. His particular concern is what happens when people try to stop psychiatric medication: the protracted withdrawal syndromes that are routinely dismissed or reframed as proof that the original illness has returned.
In Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent (21 May 2026), he joined Stella O'Malley to examine three interlocking failures in contemporary psychiatry. The first is the default assumption that emotional distress requires a formal diagnosis and long-term pharmacological management. The second is the systemic confusion between withdrawal and relapse — a confusion that keeps patients on drugs they might otherwise safely leave behind. The third is the near-absence of genuine informed consent: the frank, evidence-grounded conversation about dependency, risks, and alternatives that patients are entitled to before accepting a prescription.
For an Irish audience, the episode carries particular weight. Community mental health teams and CAMHS remain chronically under-resourced, and long waiting lists push many people towards GP-led medication without specialist review or follow-up. When Sørensen makes the case that depression often makes sense — that it is a comprehensible response to difficult circumstances rather than a brain malfunction requiring indefinite correction — he reframes a question Irish clinicians and patients face every day.
Stella O'Malley, drawing on her experience as both a psychotherapist and an Irish practitioner who works with people caught inside these systems, pressed him on the practical implications: what patients can ask, what they are entitled to be told, and why the withdrawal conversation is so rarely had at all.
