Peter C. Gøtzsche Quotes

“Psychiatric drugs are so widely used that they incapacitate hundreds of millions of people around the globe. This iatrogenic psychological and physical disability is caused by the drugs.

In all countries where this relationship has been examined, the increase in disability pensions for mental health issues follows rather closely the increase in psychiatric drug consumption.”

“Psychiatry does not deliver what the customers want. And what it delivers kills so many customers that it might be the third leading cause of death.”

“Psychiatry must be the weirdest business on earth. If it had not been a monopoly, but an enterprise with true competitors, it would have gone bankrupt decades ago.”

“Some years ago, an old man of about 85 years of age was admitted to a British hospital. He kept on insisting that he didn’t have time to be hospitalised because his mother needed him.

The staff didn’t believe him. But he told the truth. His mother was one of the oldest people in Britain, and she was dependent on her son’s help. The story appeared in the BMJ as a warning about distrusting what people tell their doctors.”

“We need to realise that most placebo-controlled trials and head-to-head comparisons of two active drugs are heavily biased.

As an example, significantly more patients improved on fluoxetine when fluoxetine was the drug of interest than in trials where fluoxetine was the comparator drug.”