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A Decade of Warnings: Marion Brown on FND, Psychiatric Drug Harm and the Patients Left Behind

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For more than a decade, Marion Brown has been asking an uncomfortable question: how many people diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) are actually experiencing neurological adverse effects or withdrawal symptoms caused by prescribed medication? In her latest article for Mad in America, A Decade of the Rise and Rise of "Functional Neurological Disorder" (FND), published on 10 November 2026, she revisits years of patient advocacy, published research, parliamentary petitions and correspondence with medical professionals.

Brown, a friend of FND Nope and co-founder of the patient-support and research group Recovery and Renewal, has spent years drawing attention to the consequences of psychiatric drug prescribing, particularly antidepressants and benzodiazepines. Her concern is straightforward: patients develop disabling neurological symptoms while taking these medications or attempting to withdraw from them, yet some subsequently receive an FND diagnosis without their medication history being adequately considered.

These are not necessarily obscure or medically inexplicable presentations. Tremor, abnormal movements, weakness, sensory disturbances and other neurological complaints can occur in the context of adverse drug reactions or withdrawal. Brown argues that when clinicians fail to recognise these possibilities, the diagnostic label can become a convenient stopping point rather than the beginning of a serious investigation into what happened to the patient.


Ten Years of Raising the Alarm

Brown traces her involvement back to her work as a psychotherapist in Scotland and the establishment of Recovery and Renewal in 2013. The group initially offered peer support to people struggling with the consequences of prescribed psychiatric medication, but its members increasingly encountered difficulties obtaining recognition and appropriate support from healthcare services. By 2016, Brown had begun publicly questioning the overlap between medication-related symptoms and diagnoses such as Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) and FND.

What followed was not simply a series of social media complaints. Brown and fellow campaigners pursued formal channels, including Scottish and Welsh parliamentary petitions, engagement with the British Medical Association, correspondence with clinicians and contributions to the medical literature. Their concerns centred on the possibility that recognised medication harms were being missed, dismissed or reclassified under diagnoses that did not adequately account for the patients' treatment histories.

In 2020, Brown and colleagues published The Patient Voice: An Analysis of Free-Text Responses to a Questionnaire on Antidepressant Withdrawal in Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. The publication documented patient-reported experiences of antidepressant withdrawal and the difficulties people encountered obtaining recognition and support. Although patient accounts cannot establish the prevalence of FND misdiagnosis, they provide evidence of experiences that deserve investigation rather than automatic dismissal.

Brown also highlights the experience of Stevie Lewis, who developed a severe movement disorder associated with SSRI withdrawal and subsequently received an FND diagnosis. Lewis publicly described her experience in the RxISK article "My Doctor Thinks I'm Faking It; SSRI Movement Disorders." Brown identifies other patients within her advocacy network who received FND diagnoses following medication-related difficulties.

These accounts raise a serious question about diagnostic practice. If a patient develops neurological symptoms during treatment or withdrawal, why would a clinician fail to examine that temporal relationship before settling on an FND explanation? A diagnosis does not make a medication history irrelevant, and failing to investigate a plausible drug-related cause is not diagnostic thoroughness.


When Recognised Drug Effects Become Unexplained Symptoms

One of the most important developments Brown discusses is the publication of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines by Mark Horowitz and David Taylor in 2024. The guidelines acknowledge that psychiatric drug withdrawal can produce symptoms overlapping with conditions including FND, chronic fatigue syndrome and categories of medically unexplained symptoms. They also warn that misdiagnosis can result in inappropriate treatment and patients feeling that their experiences have not been heard.

This is the fundamental problem. Symptoms do not become medically unexplained merely because the clinician has failed to identify their cause. Nor does assigning a diagnostic label establish that medication toxicity, withdrawal, neurological disease or another physiological process has been adequately investigated.

Brown also revisits information previously published on Jon Stone's Neurosymptoms website concerning antidepressant withdrawal. She reports that the website initially described withdrawal symptoms as generally resolving within approximately a week, with later wording acknowledging that some patients report longer-lasting symptoms associated with withdrawal or the medication itself. The evolution of this wording matters because prolonged withdrawal has historically been insufficiently recognised, leaving patients vulnerable to having their experiences attributed to other conditions.

Brown's broader concern is that medication-related neurological presentations may disappear into FND statistics. Once a patient receives the label, subsequent clinicians may focus on that diagnosis rather than reconsidering the circumstances in which the symptoms developed. The original possibility of prescribed harm can be lost beneath an accumulating medical record of diagnoses, referrals and treatments.


The Expansion of FND and the Questions Nobody Should Ignore

Brown describes the increasing prominence of FND over the past decade, including the establishment of the international FND Society, professional conferences, expanding research programmes and patient organisations. Meanwhile, she argues, the possibility that some diagnosed patients are experiencing adverse medication effects has received insufficient attention.

Her latest intervention includes a January 2026 submission to the Scottish Parliament concerning Petition PE2165, in which she again urges recognition of adverse drug effects and withdrawal syndromes that may be mistaken for FND. She is particularly concerned about prescribing practices that involve rapid tapering, medication switching or the addition of further drugs when the patient's existing symptoms may already be medication-related.

Brown goes further, questioning whether the increasing use of FND diagnoses is concealing an expanding burden of prescribed harm. That is a serious allegation, and the article does not establish how frequently this happens or what proportion of FND diagnoses might be affected. But the absence of those figures is not an excuse to ignore the underlying question. It is a reason to investigate it properly.

There is a difference between documenting a neurological presentation and demonstrating its cause. A patient can exhibit signs associated with FND while also having a relevant medication exposure, withdrawal history or another medical condition requiring investigation. The presence of a diagnostic label cannot substitute for that investigation.

Brown has spent years asking the medical profession to confront this possibility. The response she describes has included resistance, limited engagement and repeated attempts to obtain formal recognition through established channels. Her account is not evidence that every FND diagnosis is wrong, nor does it need to be. It documents a longstanding patient-safety concern with potentially serious consequences for people whose neurological symptoms follow prescribed treatment.

The question is not whether FND has become more visible, more organised or more widely promoted. The question is whether the diagnostic process is reliably distinguishing the presentations being labelled FND from neurological consequences of medication exposure and withdrawal.

If clinicians are missing recognised adverse drug reactions, the consequences are not merely semantic. Patients may receive inappropriate treatment, experience further medication-related harm and lose opportunities for appropriate clinical management. The medical record may then preserve the diagnosis while obscuring the circumstances that produced the symptoms.

After a decade of warnings, petitions, published patient experiences and growing recognition of prolonged psychiatric drug withdrawal, the burden should not remain entirely on harmed patients to prove that their medication histories deserve attention. Clinicians have a responsibility to investigate plausible causes before treating an explanatory label as a settled answer.

Calling something FND does not establish what caused it. And if prescribed harm is being missed beneath that label, awareness campaigns and expanding diagnostic services will not correct the problem. They may simply help it continue.


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