In his article in Lancet Psychiatry, “Drug development in psychiatry: 50 years of failure and how to resuscitate it,” leading UK psychiatrist, David Nutt, inadvertently kills his own specialty. As I show in my commentary, Nutt puts the blame for psychiatry’s failure outside psychiatry. He propagates the lie about the chemical imbalance causing psychiatric disorders and when he speaks about “anti-psychiatry lobby groups,” he includes psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff who showed three years ago that the chemical imbalance is an emperor without clothes. We have never heard of “anti-cardiology” lobby groups, have we?
Nutt suggests more of the same: drugs. A popular definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result. In my paper, “Are Psychiatrists More Mad Than Their Patients?” I argue that they are.
There are clear elements of cognitive dissonance in Nutt’s article. There is none so blind as he or she who WILL NOT SEE, and Nutt ends his article with a series of statements that disagree with the facts. He provides the strongest testament to the total failure of biological psychiatry and self-inflicted blindness among its leaders I have ever seen.