Is Your Mental Illness Real? A Psychiatrist Says... Maybe Not.
Sickboy
CBC
4.8 • 524 Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2025
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Sami Timimi is a psychiatrist with a bone to pick with his own profession: he thinks we’ve fallen down a diagnostic rabbit hole, and he’s here to help us climb back out. This week, the boys sit down with the child psychiatrist who is effectively flipping the table on his own profession. We live in an era where everyone and their dog seems to have a diagnosis. But what if those labels (ADHD, Depression, Autism) aren't actually explaining why we struggle, but are just describing how we struggle? Dr. Timimi argues that modern psychiatry has fallen down a rabbit hole of "upside-down science," turning ordinary human distress into medical disorders without the biological proof to back it up. We get into the weeds on the "myth" of the chemical imbalance, why psychiatric diagnoses are nothing like diagnosing diabetes, and the potential harm of identifying too closely with a label.
Dr. Timimi's Work: Visit samitimimi.co.uk
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's becoming pretty clear that U.S. President Donald Trump is ripping up the political |
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| 0:30.2 | This is a CBC podcast. |
| 0:32.3 | This is a CBC podcast. Dr. Sammy Tamimi, you are a child and adolescent psychiatrist, but your work is, |
| 0:51.9 | your work is a major critique of your own field, at least it feels like with this latest |
| 0:58.1 | book. |
| 0:59.1 | You've been in this game for a while. |
| 1:01.9 | And my opening question here is, is when did you first look around at your colleagues and, |
| 1:08.5 | you know, at the surge of diagnoses, especially in kids, and start to think to yourself, |
| 1:13.5 | okay, we're fucking this up. |
| 1:17.6 | Well, here's the thing. |
| 1:19.3 | I'm, I would consider myself to be a traditional child psychiatrist. |
| 1:24.8 | Because when I was training in child and adolescent psychiatry back in the early |
| 1:29.1 | to mid-1990s in the UK, we didn't diagnose any body. We just had presenting problems. We used to work |
| 1:38.6 | quite closely with pediatrics. So my first job was actually in a child and adolescent department based in a pediatric hospital |
| 1:47.0 | where we had outpatients and we had a couple of beds. |
| 1:50.7 | And we used to think predominantly systemically, which is that you'd think about the child within |
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