Psychiatrists Joanna Moncrieff and Sami Timimi discuss their new books

AD4E is extremely excited about the publication of these upcoming books by our valued allies Professor Joanna Moncrieff and Professor Sami Timimi.

We've invited them both to tell us about their respective books and why they've written them!

Joanna's new book

Chemically Imbalance: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth

Publication date: January 2025
For decades now the public has been told that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance and that antidepressants work by targeting this mechanism. Millions of people have decided to take antidepressants based on this information.
Chemically Imbalanced tells the story of a scientific myth and its consequences. It traces the history of the serotonin theory of depression from its development in the 1960s, through its inculcation into popular culture in the 1990s, to the recent revelations that it is not supported by evidence.
The story illustrates the power of human interests to shape what passes as scientific knowledge, and provides people with essential information about depression and antidepressants they will not readily find elsewhere. Above all else, Chemically Imbalanced is an invitation to better understand and advocate for our mental health.

Joanna's biography

Joanna Moncrieff is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and works as a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS in London. She researchers and writes about the over-use and misrepresentation of psychiatric drugs and about the history, politics and philosophy of psychiatry more generally. She has led and collaborated on government-funded research into helping people to reduce antipsychotics and stop antidepressants. Joanna is co-founder and Chair-person of the Critical Psychiatry Network, and author of numerous scientific papers and several books about psychiatric drugs including The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2009), The Bitterest Pills (2013) and A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Drugs (2020). Her website is https://joannamoncrieff.com/, Twitter handle @joannamoncrieff

Sami's new book

Searching For Normal: A new approach to understanding mental health, distress and neurodiversity

Publishing date: 20th March 2025

More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism.
More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders.
Young people are being medicalised for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world.
Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment.
So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?
In Searching for Normal, Dr Sami Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and presents, instead, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

Sami's biography

Dr Sami Timimi is a practising consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the NHS. He has written 40 book chapters, mainly in academic books, on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems and cross-cultural psychiatry; authored six books, includingNaughty Boys: Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture; co-edited four books, including, with Carl Cohen,Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics and Mental Health; and co-authored two others including, with Neil Gardiner and Brian McCabe,The Myth of Autism: Medicalising Men’s and Boys’ Social and Emotional Competence. His most recent book, published in 2021, isInsane Medicine: How the Mental Health Industry Creates Damaging Treatment Traps and How You Can Escape Them.

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