Anders Sørensen
Clinical psychologist and author
Danish clinical psychologist Anders Sørensen has spent his career questioning psychiatry's dominant assumptions — not from outside the field, but from within it. His book Crossing Zero makes the case that distress is over-diagnosed, antidepressant withdrawal is routinely minimised, and patients deserve far more honesty about the treatments they are offered. On Beyond Gender, he brings that challenge directly to the conversation.
Anders Sørensen is a Danish clinical psychologist whose work sits at the uncomfortable intersection of clinical practice and institutional critique. Where many professionals treat psychiatry's diagnostic framework and prescribing norms as settled science, Sørensen has spent years examining the evidence — and finding it wanting. His book Crossing Zero sets out his argument that emotional and psychological distress is routinely converted into medical diagnoses and treated with drugs, often before less invasive, psychotherapeutic alternatives have been properly considered.
He joined Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Bret Alderman for The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent (May 2026), one of the podcast's most forensically argued episodes. The conversation moves through the landscape of psychiatric overdiagnosis, the gap between what clinicians tell patients about antidepressants and what the research actually shows, and the specific problem of withdrawal — a phenomenon Sørensen argues is systematically downplayed, leaving patients unprepared for what stopping medication actually involves.
What makes Sørensen's critique distinctive is that he mounts it on psychiatry's own terms. He is not anti-medicine; he is pro-evidence. His concern is with a system that has drifted from the rigorous standards it claims to uphold: inadequate disclosure, overconfident diagnosis, and a structural bias toward medication over therapy. For the Beyond Gender audience, already attuned to questions about medical authority, informed consent and the limits of institutional expertise, his analysis lands with particular force.
The episode is essential listening for anyone who has ever been handed a prescription and wondered whether there was another way — or who has tried to stop taking one and found the process far harder than they were led to expect.
