Anders Sørensen
Clinical psychologist and psychiatry critic
Danish clinical psychologist Anders Sørensen challenges psychiatry from inside the consulting room — questioning how the profession frames distress, what patients are told about stopping medication, and why talking therapies have been pushed to the margins. For a Europe navigating mounting mental-health waiting lists and a growing critical-psychiatry movement, his arguments are timely.
Anders Sørensen is a Danish clinical psychologist whose work sits at the intersection of clinical practice and structural critique. In the Beyond Gender episode The Problem with Psychiatry, Withdrawals & Informed Consent (May 2026), he argued that psychiatry routinely converts ordinary human suffering — grief, trauma, social distress — into diagnosable disorder, a framing that shapes treatment decisions long before a patient has considered alternatives. The implication for European listeners is immediate: the same diagnostic drift he describes in Denmark is visible across mental-health systems from Helsinki to Lyon.
His second line of attack concerns what happens when patients try to stop. Sørensen contends that the profession has systematically underestimated withdrawal effects from psychiatric medications and that patients are not honestly prepared for what discontinuation involves. This failure of informed consent is not merely a clinical problem: in a European legal context where patient autonomy is anchored in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and in national health law across member states, it carries direct regulatory and ethical weight that clinicians and health ministries cannot easily set aside.
Sørensen's third argument — that psychotherapy has been structurally sidelined in favour of pharmacological approaches — resonates across a continent where access to publicly funded talking therapies varies dramatically. In Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany, waiting times for psychological treatment remain long even as prescription rates for antidepressants and anxiolytics have risen steadily. His case that this imbalance reflects professional and economic incentives rather than clinical evidence gives European policymakers a sharper lens through which to examine mental-health commissioning.
For the critical-psychiatry tradition that has long had roots in northern Europe — from Scandinavian research questioning diagnostic expansion to Dutch and German debates about over-medicalisation — Sørensen's presence on Beyond Gender connects clinical dissent to the broader moment of scrutiny around gender medicine. His core claims, however, stand independently of that context: that suffering deserves interpretation before it receives a label, and that the drugs used to treat it deserve the same rigorous, honest appraisal we would apply to any other medical intervention.
