Books: Evidence-biased Antidepressant Prescription: Overmedicalisation, Flawed Research, and Conflicts of Interest

Abstract

Michael P Hengartner Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, HB, 361pp, £109.99, 978-3030825867 Hengartner begins ‘Over my academic career, I went into different stages of belief and disbelief.’ In his studies of clinical psychology and psychopathology in Switzerland in the early 2000s Hengartner learned about Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) psychiatric diagnoses as if these were clear-cut natural disease entities, and was taught that this is how humans think, behave, and feel because it has been confirmed in this or that study. He never considered ‘that many, perhaps most of these studies, could be simply wrong.’ His discomfort began in 2010 when, as a PhD student, doing what he had been taught at university and by his supervisors somehow ‘didn’t feel right.’ After completing his PhD in 2014 he took up a tenured position at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where metascience, research methodology, statistics, and the philosophy of science became his primary research interests. In this post Hengartner searched the …