Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
21 May 2026
With Dr Anders Sørensen
therapy-and-psychology
The patterns that erode good psychiatric care — overpathologising distress, obscuring withdrawal effects, withholding honest consent — are the same patterns critics identify in gender medicine. Clinical psychologist Dr Anders Sørensen draws on his research into psychiatric drug withdrawal to ask why institutions resist correction even when the evidence demands it. His answers illuminate a structural problem that reaches well beyond any single specialty.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist and the author of Crossing Zero, a book examining the science and practice of coming off psychiatric drugs. His conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts moves across the architecture of modern psychiatry — how distress gets turned into diagnosis, how drugs get prescribed, and what happens when patients try to stop taking them. One of Sørensen's central arguments is that psychiatry routinely overpathologises ordinary human suffering. Depression, anxiety, grief — these states can carry meaning. They often make sense as responses to a person's circumstances. When they are immediately reframed as biological disorders requiring pharmacological correction, something important is lost: the possibility that the emotion is telling the patient something worth hearing. He is not dismissive of extreme cases, but he argues that defaulting to medication too often bypasses the kind of psychotherapeutic work that can produce lasting change. A particularly consequential gap in standard practice is the confusion between relapse and withdrawal. When patients reduce or stop antidepressants and symptoms return or intensify, this is frequently interpreted as proof that the original diagnosis was correct — that the drug is simply necessary. Sørensen challenges this framing directly. Withdrawal effects can mimic or amplify the very symptoms the drug was prescribed to treat, and patients are rarely told this in advance. That failure is, at its core, an informed consent failure: people cannot make genuine choices about treatment when they are not given accurate information about what stopping will feel like. Sørensen also introduces hyperbolic tapering — a method of reducing psychiatric drugs slowly and in carefully diminishing increments, rather than the abrupt or rapid reductions that standard protocols often recommend. That the psychiatric mainstream has been slow to adopt this approach points to something beyond individual clinical error. It reflects institutional inertia, the influence of pharmaceutical interests on prescribing culture, and a profession that has built its authority around diagnosis and medication in ways that can make it structurally resistant to correction even when the evidence accumulates. The parallels to the controversy over gender medicine are not incidental. The same questions arise in both debates: are institutions giving patients honest information about long-term outcomes? Are difficult emotions being pathologised rather than explored through therapy? Are clinicians who raise concerns being heard or marginalised? Sørensen's framework, drawn from psychiatry's own internal reckoning, offers a vocabulary for evaluating any medical field where ideological momentum and institutional prestige can outrun the evidence base. What Sørensen's work ultimately demonstrates is that this is a structural problem — what happens when a medical culture grows more committed to a model than to the individual patient in front of it. That question is one Beyond Gender has been asking about gender medicine from the start, and this conversation makes clear why the hard lessons emerging from within psychiatry deserve careful attention.
