Paul McHugh
Psychiatrist and author
One of American psychiatry's most respected dissenters, Paul McHugh has spent six decades watching the profession succumb to fashionable error — and has developed precise language for how it happens. At 93, he brought that hard-won clarity to a conversation with Stella, Mia and Bret that cuts to the heart of what went wrong in gender medicine.
Paul McHugh spent more than two decades as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital and is University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His books, including Try to Remember and The Mind Has Mountains, trace how psychiatry can lose its empirical footing — and what the cost looks like in individual lives. That long career gives him something rare in this debate: the authority of someone who has watched the cycle happen before.
The intellectual core of McHugh's argument is the overvalued idea — a belief so fixed, and so socially reinforced, that it bypasses normal clinical scrutiny. He has shown how this mechanism drove the recovered-memory movement and the epidemic of multiple personality disorder diagnoses in the late twentieth century. His claim — the one that makes critics most uncomfortable — is that he recognises the same pattern operating in gender medicine today.
He returned to the podcast for a sharper second conversation with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman in episode 46, How an Overvalued Belief Captured Medicine – Paul McHugh Explains More (November 2025). At 93, drawing on six decades at psychiatry's front line, he brought a precision that shorter careers rarely afford — naming the mechanisms, not just the symptoms, and explaining, with uncomfortable specificity, why he is convinced the profession has gone off the rails again.
McHugh co-authored a widely discussed 2016 report in The New Atlantis on sexuality and gender with biostatistician Lawrence Mayer, and his writing on gender medicine has made him one of the most cited — and most contested — figures in the debate. The podcast conversation catches him at his most direct.
