Gretchen Watson

Clinical & pediatric psychologist who explores why so many kids are on psych meds and still unwell.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Dr. Suzanne Burdick covered a lot of critical ground in her report. https://t.co/eZJqQIhfXN

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

An essay that would do us ALL good to read.

[Sean T at RCP @SeanTrende]

I almost hesitate to promote this, because it wasn't really intended to be a piece. I just sort of sat down and it came out. Maybe someone else out there has the same type of day today, and it'll speak to them.
https://t.co/xSMUDOrHcC

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

An excellent recap of hormone therapy for post-menopausal women, including a critical fact the new narrative leaves out.

[Brownstone Institute @brownstoneinst]

Some clinicians and public-health researchers would argue that the media narrative minimizes known and proven downsides of these drugs.
~@AKECassels
The Biggest Breast Cancer Advance in the Last Twenty Years
https://t.co/oOvQx1rtP9

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

On psychiatric medicalization -- the turning of human suffering into a medical condition ...

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

Excellent piece in @nytimes. The 'core ideas [of the alliance] are that mainstream psychiatry is too quick to see normal human suffering as a disease, that its diagnostic labels often crush a patients identity and sense of agency and that psychotropics, for many, do more harm than good'. https://t.co/YCY2Xmsc76.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

“There’s a cultural groundswell driven by the massive disconnect between what people are told and what they experience in mental health treatment contexts.”

[Cooper Davis @Cooperdavis]

As usual, Awais puts more thought into the discourse du jour than anyone else

If only the majority of his colleagues in psychiatric practice shared his incisiveness and caution against certainties; then perhaps there would be no need for reforms of any kind

My only major objection is that it’s a little early for an autopsy, and the anatomy of the present moment in psychiatry is very hard to chart while looking solely at what makes it into the pages of NYT, WaPo, etc, or goes viral on social media

There’s a cultural groundswell driven by the massive disconnect between what people are told and what they experience in mental health treatment contexts

The aspects of this shift in public sentiment that are cast into to relief by high profile events and coverage describe only one small aspect of the larger elephant

The coiling movement Awais is coining as “MAHA psychiatry” or “Moncrieff-Whitaker-Delano brand of psychiatric critique” is going to be very difficult to summarize, let alone analyze, until the potential energy that has long been building the in shadow of the field’s other concerns has discharged a great deal more fulsomely than it has over the last few weeks

This movement is much older, bigger, weirder and multifactorial than retail, non-critical psychiatry is equipped to recognize fully

much like the human condition

Happy #mentalhealthawareness Month!

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

The President-Elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Timothy E. Wilens, MD, did not appreciate my comments at the Mental Health & Overmedicalization Summit in Washington, D.C. last week. What did I say? I referred to long-term follow-up data from the NIMH-funded Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), which showed that prolonged stimulant use is associated with a deterioration in academic and social-emotional functioning. Shame on this industry-co-opted psychiatrist for overselling the benefits of drug therapy, and shame on Nature for publishing related research without providing links to the underlying data.https://t.co/T2quHFCipe

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

When AACAP appoint Wilens as president of the organization, you know the field has been corrupted/been bought and paid for by Big Pharma.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Nature did not include links to any of the MTA study results showing that longterm use of stimulants is associated with a deterioration in academic and social-emotional function - information I, of course, shared with her. Why does the media continually give credence to researchers whose corruption has been documented? Hmmm

[Paul D. Thacker @thackerpd]

Nature Magazine is now a Big Pharma mouthpiece. They quote the corrupt Timothy Wilens knocking down @SecKennedy, who states the obvi: psych meds are overprescribed to kids.

I ran the Senate investigation, covered by Nature, that caught Wilens taking tons of Big Pharma cash.

Nature is now trying to pretend that Wilens isn't who he is--a Harvard professor so in love with Big Pharma that his scandal forced Harvard to redo their entire conflict of interest policies, across the campus and all hospitals.

Shameful reporting today by Nature, but this has become the norm and liberal outlets ally themselves with Big Pharma.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Many thanks to the @MAHA_Institute Institute and the @_innercompass Compass Initiative for inviting me to participate in an historic mental health summit in D.C. on Monday. This summit showed its human cost of the ADHD prescribing cascade through the powerful testimony of three young adults who lived the harm. The fact that HHS leaders were present and engaged gives hope that we can reverse the ADHD epidemic.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

@ChildrensHD @brownstoneinst I say this all.the.time. As Dr. Marcia Angell, a Harvard physician and 20 year editor of New England Journal of Medicine, explained years ago, we have no idea if a drug is safe until it has been on the market for 7-10 years.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Spoken by someone who is an expert on withdrawal for having been through drug withdrawal himself many, many times!

[Daniel Owens @dsowens17]

Robert F Kennedy Jr on the dangers of SSRIs:

"I’ve watched people come off SSRIs....I watched a family member get off them after a couple of years, and she was suicidal literally every day. She woke up every morning and said, ‘I don’t want to live.’ She said, ‘The only reason I’m staying alive is for you guys, for the family.’

That’s heartbreaking to hear from a family member. And I’ve heard that from hundreds and hundreds of people, the same story again and again. It can be prolonged, and for many patients it’s completely unexpected.

Physicians often handle this by saying, ‘This is your original symptoms reasserting themselves, get back on the SSRIs,’ and they get locked into a lifetime cycle that, for many patients, is cataclysmic. It’s a system failure."

RFJ Jr at the MAHA Institute at the Mental Health & Overmedicalization Summit May 4, 2026

@MikhailaFuller @_innercompass @MAHA_Institute

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Happy to have spoken at yesterday’s summit! It was terrific!

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

I don't agree with all RFK Jr's views, but am grateful that he is calling attention to the enormous problem of overmedicalisation and epidemic levels of use of psychiatric drugs.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Laura Delano's testimony: House Committee on Oversight and Government Re... https://t.co/yfeC9J8Phu via @YouTube

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

An excellent essay! It speaks to the “lost art of healing” to quote the late Dr. Bernard Lown

[Joseph Varon @joevaron]

My new OpEd at Brownstone: The Quiet Crisis of Procedural Medicine https://t.co/OYUlJrvAkG via @brownstoneinst

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

More disease-mongering from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. As if middle aged women aren't medicated enough (25% take antidepressants). https://t.co/1BeGHoyVdT

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

@JDaviesPhD Who is mentally ill here?

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Just because: “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” G.B.S.

[Bob Golen @BobGolen]

Just my luck, my 250 million year old salt has expired

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

Free Speech Legal Defense Fund https://t.co/wuc8JZlaxR Please read, share, and consider.

[Gretchen Watson @DrGWatson]

@RobertKennedyJc Please share with this who need to hear this or can help stop this insanity. https://t.co/4oGlvNQjKI