RT by @recover2renew: Thank you, Mark, for correcting the record and making it clear that we did NOT misrepresent our research, as accused. I have requested that the Journal that published this paper issues a correction too.

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10 Nov 2026 0 comments

Thank you, Mark, for correcting the record and making it clear that we did NOT misrepresent our research, as accused. I have requested that the Journal that published this paper issues a correction too.

Mark Horowitz @markhoro.bsky.social (@markhoro)

Jack has not permitted comments to be put on his blog so I’ll post this here. Many of the points in his blog are false.

He has latterly corrected the quotation from our press release after I emailed him (although he does not disclose this was the reason for his correction).

As he now acknowledges, we did not say what he had quoted us as saying and he has now corrected the quotation to say “this research calls into question reasonsfor the use of antidepressants.”

Of course our paper calls into question the main rationale given to patients for prescribing these drugs – of course it calls the ‘reasons’ into question. He and others may wish to argue that the drugs are prescribed because they are effective (discussed at length elsewhere) but the rationale presented to many patients was (and is) false.

Naturally, if it were found that Hashimoto’s disease was not caused by low thyroid hormones it would throw into question the rationale for prescribing thyroid hormones. It would throw into relief questions about long term harms and benefits of such a treatment that would not be raised if the treatment was acting in the self-evidently sensible manner of correcting a hormonal deficit.

His central accusation – and the central point of his published article – is that we misleadingly presented our review regarding the aetiology of depression as showing that antidepressants are ineffective. We did not such thing. Jack could find no such quote in our press release so he fudged it. (I believe this is the polite euphemism).

Of course such a finding about aetiology invites reflection on the efficacy of the drugs and so naturally we discussed this in the Conversation piece - our comments in this piece are all supported by evidence.

His statement about the Nordic Cochrane is also false. Nordic Cochrane moved from Righospitalet in Copenhagen to the University of Southern Denmark in Odense where it merged with the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and was renamed to Cochrane Denmark. It still functions today and houses the Cochrane Bias Methods Group which advises Cochrane : cochrane.dk/
He is performing quite some somersaults, slinging mud from unrelated comments made by Peter Breggin, and Peter Gotzsche, to avoid reading an article published in the BMJ Open. An article I would still encourage him and other to read so that they become aware of the substantive criticisms of Cipriani’s meta-analysis rather than assuming the solidity of claims made about antidepressant efficacy: bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/6/…

I expect that after correcting his recent blog he will also correct his original blog on Awais’ website (where he falsely says: “a press release written by Moncrieff and co-author Mark Horowitz explicitly linked the umbrella review to a lack of efficacy in antidepressants”) and his academic paper were he makes the same false claim (“a press release written by Moncrieff and co-author Mark Horowitz explicitly linked the umbrella review to a lack of efficacy in antidepressants”) as he has now acknowledged that these claims are false.

I would like to be notified when these corrections are made.

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