Description

This book presents a collaboration of users and survivors of psychiatry (ex-patients), professionals, researchers, lawyers, and academics around the world committed to helping people understand the potential harm (including drug dependence) that prescribed psychotropic drugs can cause and how to safely reduce or stop taking them. The chapters include individual accounts of people who discontinued their prescribed psychotropic drugs, information about withdrawal groups, research data (especially about antidepressants and neuroleptics) and a commitment to relatively safe withdrawal that will offer hope to many people; those who want to help and those who want to withdraw.

The editors of this volume met long ago – a MIND conference in Brighton, England. Craig’s first MIND event, and Peter’s first speech from the floor in English — a halting, but searing, critique of the Keynote speaker; a psychiatrist promoting drugs and electroshock. Peter was applauded. The psychiatrist had the good grace to sit down, abashed. Friends from that day on the editors have shared meals, sadness, times in Shrewsbury or Lancaster and Berlin and now — of course — Zoom meetings. Both have a passion for telling it like it is — both have been vilified by the establishment, but they’re still here.