Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
Danish clinical psychologist Anders Sørensen argues that psychiatry routinely misreads human suffering as disorder, that patients are not honestly informed about what stopping psychiatric drugs involves, and that psychotherapy has been systematically sidelined. For European clinicians, policymakers and patients, his critique lands with particular force — and it travels directly into the debate over whether medical systems on the continent are repeating the same epistemological errors in gender medicine that they have already made in mental health.
Anders Sørensen is a Danish clinical psychologist who works at the intersection of psychiatric drug research and clinical practice. His book Crossing Zero addresses a problem patients encounter but medicine rarely acknowledges openly: coming off psychiatric drugs is often far harder than they were told when they started, and what looks like relapse may in fact be withdrawal. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Bret Alderman, he lays out both the science and the human cost of this diagnostic blind spot. At the heart of the episode is a structural critique of how psychiatry relates to psychology — and to evidence. Sørensen describes a clinical culture in which the diagnostic and pharmacological model dominates not because the research conclusively supports it but because institutions are built to reward it. For continental European listeners, this is familiar territory. Whether in Stockholm, Hamburg or Paris, a GP under pressure is more likely to prescribe than to refer, partly because therapy waiting lists can stretch to a year or more and partly because the system is organised around diagnosis rather than meaning. Sørensen's counter-argument is that depression and anxiety very often make sense. They are intelligible, and sometimes appropriate, responses to life circumstances — loss, trauma, isolation — rather than chemical malfunctions to be corrected. This does not mean suffering should go untreated; it means that psychotherapeutic approaches deserve a genuine place in the conversation, not merely as a fallback once medication has failed. The episode gives detailed attention to informed consent and to the clinical technique Sørensen advocates: hyperbolic tapering, a gradual and mathematically calibrated dose reduction that standard prescribing protocols rarely follow. Patients across Europe starting or stopping psychiatric medication are typically not told what the current evidence says about dependence, withdrawal timelines or the limits of the diagnostic categories they have been given. That gap between what the science supports and what patients are told represents a policy failure as much as a clinical one — and it sits within the remit of European health authorities. The resonance with the gender medicine debate is clear and deliberate. In Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, national health bodies have already curtailed youth gender treatments on the grounds that the evidence was thinner than advertised and that psychological alternatives were bypassed too quickly. Sørensen's analysis of how a medical system can overpromise, under-disclose and sideline therapy travels exactly the same diagnostic road in a different domain. For European clinicians trying to hold a careful evidential line, and for patients who have felt the weight of institutional failure, this episode provides both language and a framework.
