Author of recent paper about SSRI mechanism is an Anti Vaxxer. She is perturbed that right wingers
instead of left wingers have taken her paper and ran with it.
Who Is the Psychiatrist Behind the Antidepressant Study Taking Over Right-Wing Media?
Joanna Moncrieff has spent two decades questioning the efficacy of SSRIs — and more recently, she’s gone after Covid-19 vaccine mandates
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Moncrieff cites pediatric vaccine mandates in the United States as an example of the “paternalism” of public health interventions, and frames mental health care interventions — as well as mental illness as a diagnostic category — as an effort on behalf of the state to exert mind control tactics over individuals who refuse to conform to societal standards, referring to psychiatry as “the arena in which the conflict between freedom and health comes most sharply into focus.”
More recently, she has used her platform to publicly question mandatory Covid vaccines for health care workers in the U.K.. Last year, she was one of the signatories of an open letter from health care professionals opposed to the mandates, which, while acknowledging that they can be helpful for some people, maintained “there is considerable uncertainty about the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines.” In the past, she has also compared Covid vaccine mandates to forced psychiatric care. “Forced treatment in psychiatry is rightly controversial and limited, but now we are forcing thousands to have Covid jab,” she tweeted last December.
On at least one occasion, she inaccurately connected severe Covid-19 symptoms to antidepressant or antipsychotic use (in fact, data from an observational study suggests that taking SSRIs may actually reduce a person’s risk of dying from Covid). When asked for further evidence to support this view, Moncrieff demurred, saying, “I have not been following this story recently, so can’t give you any more recent information on this.”
While Aftab may believe it is not an accident that the paper was embraced by the right, Moncrieff is somewhat perturbed by the segment of the U.S. media currently championing her research. “I am perplexed at why this story has been taken up by the right-wing media more than the left,” she says. She believes that treating mental illness with medication constitutes “inappropriately medicalising distress and thereby obscuring the effects of social injustice, poverty, inequality, racism, child abuse etc, [which] should be a major concern for the left.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ssri-right-wing-attack-joanna-moncrieff-1388067/
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