https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/mental-health-survival-kit-and-withdrawal

Psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death in the developed world, after heart disease and cancer. The estimate comes from Peter Gøtzsche’s 2022 book Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs, and it is built from regulatory data the drug companies tried to keep buried. One drug alone — Zyprexa — was estimated to have killed 200,000 patients up to 2007. In a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials covering 5,000 elderly demented patients, one in 100 was dead within ten weeks on a psychosis pill; when Gøtzsche checked the underlying FDA data, the rate doubled, because around half of all deaths in psychiatric drug trials never reach publication. The TIPS study followed 281 first-episode psychosis patients with an average age of 29; within ten years, 12% of them were dead, and the authors mentioned the deaths only in a flowchart of patients lost to follow-up.

Gøtzsche is a specialist in internal medicine, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993, and author of more than 75 papers in the BMJ, the Lancet, JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine. His scientific work has been cited over 150,000 times. He came to psychiatry from outside the speciality — his earlier books include Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime, which won the British Medical Association’s annual book award in 2014, and Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial. He was eventually expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration he had helped found, after the organisation’s leadership decided his criticism of the HPV vaccine and of psychiatric drugs threatened its institutional standing. The expulsion is documented in his 2019 book Death of a Whistleblower and Cochrane’s Moral Collapse. He continues his work through the Institute for Scientific Freedom in Copenhagen, which he founded the same year.

When the book appeared, Danish psychiatry professors were still telling patients in officially endorsed handbooks that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance corrected by depression pills — a claim the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, Steven Hyman, had already publicly disowned in 1996. A 2019 review of 39 popular health websites in 10 countries found 74% still made the same claim. The UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence had spent five decades denying that the drugs were addictive — a denial precisely paralleling the 50-year delay before barbiturates were acknowledged as addictive, and the 30-year delay for benzodiazepines. The 2020 BBC programme that finally broke ranks still featured a voiceover assuring viewers that “although they are not addictive, they can lead to dependency issues.” Gøtzsche was writing into a profession actively defending the same lies it had told patients for half a century, while the patients themselves — surveyed as early as 1991 — had already concluded by a 78% margin that the drugs were addictive.

Gøtzsche is not a terrain practitioner. He is an evidence-based-medicine reformer working within mainstream pharmacology, but his findings converge with what Shelton documented a century earlier: drugs prescribed to suppress the body’s response to insult drive acute conditions toward chronic disease, and the harms of the suppression are then misread as evidence of progressing illness. The full summary unpacks the mechanism in detail — the cold-turkey trial design that converts withdrawal injury into apparent drug efficacy, the 12% greater dropout rate on drug than on placebo across 67,319 pages of clinical study reports that no researcher outside the companies had ever read, the 5 cm permanent height loss in children on stimulants at 16-year follow-up, the 79% rate of akathisia among mentally ill patients who attempted suicide, the contrast between drug-heavy Stockholm and the Open Dialogue model in Lappland where 19% versus 62% of first-episode psychosis patients ended up on disability five years later. The mother of one Danish patient killed by overdosed psychosis pills against her warnings was told the death was natural. Her daughter’s last words to her, before the lethal injection, were: Mom, won’t you tell the world how we’re treated?