Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murphy and this is the podcast

in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that

have helped shape them. My guest this week is Joanna Moncrief. Now Joanna is a psychiatrist and is

perhaps the leading skeptical voice in the use of antidepressants to treat depression. She has written

widely and she's appeared on a lot of media

and she's a controversial figure and her latest book is called Chemically Imbalanced,

The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin myth.

Joanna, how would you change the world? I would radically demedicalise our understanding and treatment of mental health problems.

I think that understanding things like depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc.

As if they are medical problems that arise from the brain is harmful to the individuals themselves.

I don't think it leads to good outcomes. And I think

it's harmful to society because it distracts our attention from what is actually making people

unhappy and stressed in the first place. And so I would relocate help for people with mental

health problems out of medical facilities, out of GP surgeries,

probably to somewhere like social services, where they wouldn't be treated for their diagnosis,

for their label, but actually helped to deal with the problems that had made them unhappy or

anxious or stressed in the first place. So you're not talking about just replacing drugs with therapy.

You're talking about tackling the underlying causes of depression? Yes, absolutely. I mean,

I do think therapy is helpful for some people in some situations, but I don't think it's a panacea.

And I think the main problem is that we think of people who are depressed as having this thing called depression and we treat the depression rather than helping the individual with their individual difficulties.

I mean, there are between 8 and 9 million people, we think, being treated for depression with antidepressants in Britain at the moment.

And it's thought to be a growing diagnosis post-pandemic, big increase in

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