Dr Anders Sørensen: The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent
21 May 2026
With Dr Anders Sørensen
Global
Clinical psychologist Dr Anders Sørensen questions how psychiatry pathologises ordinary distress, what patients are not told about withdrawal, and what genuine informed consent requires. His arguments carry direct weight in the UK context: the Cass Review repeatedly found that gender-distressed young people were given inadequate psychological assessment and rushed into medical pathways, and NHS England has since moved toward the psychologically led approach Cass recommended. Sørensen's case for psychotherapy over medication echoes those conclusions.
Dr Anders Sørensen is a clinical psychologist whose book Crossing Zero examines what happens when patients try to stop taking psychiatric drugs. He approaches the conversation with a clear scepticism about how psychiatry has expanded its remit, treating forms of distress that he argues often make sense as comprehensible responses to difficult circumstances. He maps the fault lines between psychiatry and psychology, and questions whether patients are routinely given the information they need to make genuine choices about the drugs they are prescribed. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, identified a pattern that makes Sørensen's argument feel immediately relevant in the UK context. Hilary Cass found that young people arriving at the Gender Identity Development Service with significant co-occurring mental health difficulties frequently did not receive adequate psychological assessment or therapy before — or instead of — a medical pathway. The tendency to treat distress as a categorical disorder requiring a pharmacological answer, rather than as something to be understood and worked through, is exactly the dynamic Sørensen interrogates in his wider critique of how psychiatry operates. One of the sharpest sections of the episode concerns informed consent. Sørensen argues that patients prescribed psychiatric drugs are routinely not told what they need to know: how dependent the brain can become, how hard stopping can be, and how withdrawal symptoms are frequently mistaken for relapse into the original condition. That confusion, he suggests, keeps many people on medication far longer than may serve their interests. The parallel with gender medicine is direct. NHS England and independent reviewers have raised persistent concerns about whether young people and their families receive adequate information before embarking on hormonal or surgical pathways. Sørensen explains hyperbolic tapering — a method of reducing doses slowly in a way that accounts for the brain's non-linear sensitivity to drug changes — as both a clinical necessity and an illustration of how slowly research translates into everyday prescribing practice. The gap between what is known and what patients are told is itself an informed-consent failure, and one he regards as structural rather than accidental. Against pharmacological management, Sørensen argues for psychotherapy as a means of building the capacity to sit with and process difficult emotions. This aligns with the direction recommended by the Cass Review and adopted by NHS England: that young people experiencing gender distress need thorough, exploratory psychological support rather than an accelerated route to medical treatment. The argument is not that distress is imagined but that it deserves a richer and more patient clinical response. For anyone following the UK debate about how the health system has served gender-distressed young people, this episode provides a useful broader frame. The failures Sørensen describes in general psychiatry — overpathologisation, gaps in informed consent, insufficient attention to therapy — are recognisably the same failures that NHS reviews, the Cass Report, and the courts have been naming in gender medicine specifically. The conversation is a reminder that those failures belong to a larger pattern in how distress is diagnosed and managed.
