Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice.

Hello, this is James and welcome to the podcast. And this week, I'm really pleased to get the

chance to chat with Dr. Michael Hengartner.

Michael is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland.

He was an expert evaluator for the European Research Council and the World Health Organization

and currently is a member of the Swiss School of Public Health,

the German Society for Social Psychiatry and the European Public Health Association.

His areas of expertise include psychiatric epidemiology, public mental health, evidence-based

medicine and conflicts of interest in psychological and biomedical research.

In this interview, we discussed Michael's recently released book entitled Evidence Biased Antidepressant

Prescription, Overmedicalization, Floored Research and Conflicts of Interest.

The book addresses the overprescribing of antidepressants, and it critically examines

the current scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of antidepressant drugs.

Michael, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today for the Madden America podcast, and

we're here to talk about your work, and in particular your new new book entitled Evidence Biased Antidepressant Prescription, Overmedicalization,

flawed research and Conflicts of Interest, which was published by Springer in 2021.

And first, I want to thank you for writing it because, you know, this is such a valuable and important

area of, you know, the mental health industry to write about. And, you know, my reflection upon

reading the book first was it's very comprehensive. It collects together an awful lot that I think,

you know, needed to be pulled together in one place. So, you know, I can't imagine it was an easy

task to do all the research for it.

So you kind of start the book yourself by writing about how you got here, which seems like a

...