Big Pharma's Trillion Dollar Deception on Mental Health | Joanna Moncrief

**Joanna Moncrieff** (0:00)
What I object to most about telling people that they've got a chemical imbalance is that that is a really depressing message. That's telling people there's something wrong with your brain, there's nothing you can do about it, you've got to rely on someone giving you a drug. Just correcting that mistake and informing people that there isn't something wrong with their brains and that they do have the capacity to improve, to recover, to change, is actually a positive and a hopeful message.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:31)
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Before we begin, I'd like to note that today's conversation explores one perspective of an area of medicine that continues to be actively debated. And while we discuss emerging evidence and critiques of current psychiatric practice, treatment decisions, especially involving antidepressants or other prescription medications, should always be made in consultation with your health care provider. The views expressed by my guest are her own and reflect her interpretation of the available evidence. My goal in hosting conversations like this is to explore different perspectives, to examine the science, to encourage thoughtful discussion, not to provide individualized medical advice.
So if you're currently taking medication, please don't stop or change your treatment based on this conversation alone. Instead, use this episode as a starting point for an informed conversation with your health care team. My hope is that these discussions encourage curiosity, critical thinking and shared decision making between patients and their clinicians. Well, Joanna, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

**Joanna Moncrieff** (2:57)
Thanks for inviting me, Mark. Really excited to talk to you.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (3:00)
I'm excited to talk to you because I think our intellectual history is very similar. We were just chatting before the podcast and a lot of the seminal books in psychiatry we both read and they were really around challenging the orthodoxy and our way of thinking about mental illness and how we approach it. I think hopefully this conversation will help us understand some of the challenges we're facing around our framing of mental illness, our understanding of some of the myths out there that are propagated that I think undermine people's public health and mental health. The title of your book is really provocative, chemically imbalanced, the making and unmaking of the serotonin myth, which is going to probably strike people like, wait a minute, I thought depression was about serotonin deficiency and Prozac was about actually helping fix that. And my joke is that a depression is not a Prozac deficiency, right?
And so I think your essential argument is really this whole chemical imbalance theory, it doesn't actually hold up when you look at it objectively, scientifically, and you're a research scientist and you look at these issues objectively, you look at them dispassionately and you're not sort of ideologically driven, you're just driven by the science and I think I find that very refreshing. And also, this is a big problem because when you look at the antidepressants as a class of drugs and depression is probably the most prevalent mental illness, it's $20 billion a year globally that's spent on this. And your thesis is essentially that they don't really work.