Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
Clinical psychologist Dr Anders Sørensen joins Stella, Mia and Bret to challenge the psychiatric establishment on its own terms. Drawing on his book Crossing Zero, he argues that distress is routinely over-diagnosed and over-medicated, that patients are rarely given honest information about antidepressant withdrawal, and that psychotherapeutic alternatives are consistently undervalued. It is a conversation with direct echoes for the Beyond Gender project: the same failures of informed consent, the same rush to a medical pathway, the same sidelining of talking therapies.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist and the author of Crossing Zero: The Art and Science of Coming Off — and Staying off — Psychiatric Drugs. His work sits at the intersection of clinical practice and systemic critique: not simply how individuals manage medication, but the broader culture inside psychiatry that has made dependence on psychiatric drugs so widespread and so poorly understood. That combination of clinical credibility and institutional scepticism makes him an unusually compelling guest for the Beyond Gender conversation. The episode opens with a theme the hosts know well — the tendency to transform ordinary human distress into a medical diagnosis requiring a pharmacological fix. Sørensen argues that depression and anxiety very often make sense as responses to real circumstances, rather than as disorders demanding correction. His framing runs against the dominant psychiatric narrative, which locates the problem inside the individual's brain chemistry and sends them away with a prescription. For a podcast that has spent considerable time examining how gender distress in young people is similarly rushed toward medical intervention, this reframing carries particular weight. A significant portion of the conversation is devoted to what happens when people try to stop taking antidepressants. Sørensen draws a clear distinction between relapse — the return of an underlying condition — and withdrawal, a physiological response to discontinuing a drug. Conflating the two, he argues, has led clinicians to keep patients on medication far longer than necessary, while leaving those patients without honest information about what they are actually experiencing. He describes hyperbolic tapering — a gradual, non-linear reduction schedule — as a safer and more humane approach to coming off antidepressants than the methods most doctors currently recommend. Sørensen is not simply a critic without alternatives. He points to psychotherapeutic models as genuinely effective tools for working with difficult emotions — approaches that take seriously the meaning behind a person's distress rather than suppressing it. Stella, herself a psychotherapist, engages directly with this material, and the exchange between practitioner and researcher is one of the episode's more energetic passages. The relevance to Beyond Gender's central concerns is never laboured, but it is consistently present. The same structures that, Sørensen argues, lead to the overmedication of adults in psychological distress — the premium on diagnosis, the minimisation of side-effects, the absence of genuine informed consent — are visible in the gender medicine debate at every turn. Listeners who have followed the podcast's analysis of how gender clinics have operated will find this episode sharpens those arguments considerably, even when the subject is antidepressants rather than puberty blockers. This is an episode that rewards careful listening. Sørensen is calm, precise and clearly informed by years of both clinical work and independent research. He challenges psychiatric orthodoxy without tipping into polemic, and the hosts give him room to develop the argument properly. It is a conversation that clarifies why scrutiny of medical institutions — in whatever field they operate — matters.
Watch and subscribe on YouTube
Open this episode on the Beyond Gender channel
