By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

The house of cards of mainstream psychiatry is coming closer to falling. Increasingly, patients and their relatives, and even an atypical journalist, are becoming aware that the psychiatric leaders have systematically lied to them.

One of the big and very harmful lies is that it is rarely a problem for patients to stop taking an antidepressant. On 9 July 2025, a systematic review was published in JAMA Psychiatry that claimed that antidepressant withdrawal is not a problem. The authors even postulated that depression after discontinuation is indicative of depression relapse.

Psychiatrists virtually always mistake withdrawal symptoms for relapse. All the studies Maryanne Demasi and I included in our systematic review of interventions to help patients withdraw from depression drugs confounded withdrawal symptoms with relapse.

Abstinence Depressions

I invented the term "abstinence depression" for withdrawal symptoms that mimic a depression. It is a depression that occurs in a patient who is not currently depressed but whose drug is stopped abruptly or over a few weeks. Its hallmark is that the depression symptoms come quickly (depending on the half-life of the drug or its active metabolites) and disappear within hours when the full dose is resumed.

Reintroducing the drug can therefore be regarded as a diagnostic test separating an abstinence depression from a true depression, which does not respond promptly to a depression pill.

A cold turkey trial showed the difference very clearly. Patients who were well suddenly had their maintenance therapy changed to a double-blind placebo for 5-8 days at a time unknown to them and their clinicians. The authors' criteria for depression were fulfilled for 25 of those 122 patients who were on sertraline or paroxetine.

I worked out, based on a study of 362 high school students who had experienced one or more episodes of depression, that the expected number of patients relapsing in such a short time interval was zero.

Garbage in, Garbage out Review

The JAMA Psychiatry review was a dangerously misleading garbage in, garbage out review. The paper lists more drug company payments to the authors than their number of references to scientific papers, which was 47. The authors mobilised a rapid media campaign to shape the public narrative, with the Science Media Centre issuing expert commentary to "reassure both patients and prescribers" that most withdrawal symptoms were "not clinically significant."

The Science Media Centre has a very bad reputation. It promotes corporate views of science and is partially funded by corporations and industry groups whose products the Centre often defends.

The review included 50 studies involving 17,828 patients. Among its many blatant methodological flaws, the review didn't assess symptom severity and it followed patients for just two weeks even though many patients report that symptoms don't emerge until after that timeframe.

Furthermore, the review relied on short-term drug company studies of just some weeks, which contrasts with the millions of people worldwide who are on these drugs for many years. The median duration of antidepressant use in the United States is approximately 5 years.

Such studies are bound to grossly underestimate the true incidence and severity of antidepressant withdrawal effects. Length of treatment is obligatory information in scientific papers, but nowhere in the article did the authors reveal that the studies they reviewed were short-term studies.

An expert on drug withdrawal, psychiatrist Mark Horowitz from the UK, wrote that "Studying what happens to people after just eight to 12 weeks on antidepressants is like testing car safety by crashing a vehicle into a wall at 5km/h - ignoring the fact that real drivers are out on the roads doing 60km/h."

Ask the Patients and not Psychiatrists on Industry Payroll

A 2019 systematic review by James Davies and John Read showed that half of the patients ex...