Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
21 May 2026
With Anders Sørensen
Global
Clinical psychologist Anders Sørensen examines the evidence base for distinguishing psychiatric drug withdrawal from genuine relapse, the gaps in informed consent before prescribing, and the clinical case for hyperbolic tapering and psychotherapy over medication. His critique of overpathologisation parallels what systematic reviews and national health authority investigations across Europe have documented in youth gender medicine: a pattern of medicalising distress, bypassing consent processes, and sidelining psychological approaches in favour of pharmacological ones.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a Danish clinical psychologist whose book Crossing Zero examines the science and practice of coming off psychiatric drugs safely. The episode explores how patients and clinicians alike often struggle to distinguish between genuine relapse — the return of an underlying condition — and withdrawal, which can mimic or intensify the original symptoms. This distinction is not merely academic. It determines whether someone remains on medication indefinitely or is supported to taper off, and it goes to the heart of how psychiatry currently handles the evidence it has generated about its own treatments. Central to the conversation is informed consent. Sørensen argues that patients are frequently not told, before starting psychiatric medication, how difficult stopping can be. The evidence around antidepressant dependence and discontinuation syndrome has grown substantially in recent years, yet clinical practice has been slow to incorporate it. Adequate informed consent requires disclosing not only the risks of taking a drug but the documented risks of coming off it — risks that can include severe and prolonged withdrawal effects that are easily misread as clinical deterioration. The episode also addresses what Sørensen describes as the overpathologisation of distress. Depression and anxiety often make sense as responses to life circumstances, yet the default in many healthcare systems is a diagnostic label and a prescription. Framing ordinary suffering as a disorder requiring pharmacological correction can strip patients of agency and foreclose the psychological frameworks — including an understanding of their own history and circumstances — that might actually help. Sørensen advocates for hyperbolic tapering, a slow graduated dose reduction that follows the brain's neurological response curve rather than a linear step-down schedule. The clinical literature supporting this approach has been building, but it remains underused. Alongside it, he discusses psychotherapeutic models focused on building tolerance for difficult emotions, arguing that these offer something medication cannot: a means of developing the internal resources to live with distress rather than suppress it. The resonance with the European gender medicine debate is not incidental. Systematic reviews and national health authority investigations in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and England have identified the same cluster of problems in youth gender services: insufficient evidence for medical interventions, inadequate informed consent processes, and the systematic marginalisation of psychotherapy. The structural pressures Sørensen identifies in psychiatry — the preference for diagnosis over context, for intervention over understanding, and for pharmacology over talking therapies — are precisely those that independent reviews have now documented in gender clinics across the continent. His analysis suggests these are not aberrations confined to one specialty but patterns embedded in how certain healthcare systems currently operate.
