A bitter row has broken out after a professor claimed that harsh criticism of her study on the effectiveness of antidepressants had overstepped the conventions of scholarly disagreement.
The bust-up comes after Molecular Psychiatry published a comment on 16 June, “A leaky umbrella has little value”, which criticised a literature review published in the journal last year that had questioned whether there was strong evidence that depression was caused by low serotonin levels.
Antidepressants are thought to treat this chemical imbalance in the brain, but according to the 2022 study led by UCL psychiatry professor Joanna Moncrieff, the “serotonin theory of depression is not empirically substantiated”.
However, the recent comment signed by 36 leading scientists was highly critical of its findings. It drew attention to what it called the review’s “inherent methodological weaknesses” and the use of “antiquated” concepts of brain science. It also attacked “simplistic misinterpretation” of evidence, concluding that the study’s “methodology is inconsistent with an umbrella review, with substantial bias created by the authors’ chosen quality criteria, selective reporting, and interpretation of results”.
