Joanna Moncrieff

Joanna Moncrieff is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist at the North East London Foundation Trust. She has always been uneasy about the use of drugs in psychiatry, and the associated idea that mental disorders are equivalent to medical diseases. In the 1990s she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network to link up with other, like-minded psychiatrists. She has been writing about the over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs since the 1990s and she has also researched and written about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She is currently leading UK government-funded research on reducing and discontinuing antipsychotic drug treatment (the RADAR study), and collaborating on a study to support antidepressant discontinuation. She is author of numerous papers and her books include The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs (2013) and The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2009) (Palgrave Macmillan)