Alarming: A Psychiatrist Tells Patients With Bipolar Disorder Not to Take Their Medication
Joanna Moncrieff discourages patients from accepting any biomedical treatment whatsoever but she offers no alternatives. She embarrassed herself this time.
Psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff and her motley crew were spotted orchestrating enthusiasm on social media for Moncrieff’s new meta-analysis. She claimed she had found no evidence that lithium prevents suicide or non-fatal suicidal behaviors.
Moncrieff’s meta-analysis crashed into a rock-solid barrier that claimed its validity and sent it to the bottom of the sea, feeding fish and growing a coral reef. The barrier has claimed all other efforts to demonstrate in an RCT or meta-analysis synthesis of RCTs that lithium prevents or fails to prevent suicide.
Despite the howling protests of anti-psychiatry folks like Moncrieff, modern psychiatric practice in industrially advanced countries does not produce enough deaths by suicide in a finite time to evaluate whether the addition or absence of lithium on an individual patient basis will produce a clinically significant effect on suicide.
Moncrieff’s unusual folly—and I claim her signature folly—is her insistence that null findings in an RCT o…