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Joanna Moncrieff is a Senior Lecturer at University College London, and also works as a consultant psychiatrist. She has written about how psychiatric drugs are misunderstood and overused and looked at the social and political influences on drug treatment.

She suggests that the idea that drugs correct an underlying chemical imbalance is a myth, and that psychiatric drugs can be better understood as producing drug-induced states that merely suppress the symptoms of mental disorders. The idea of drugs as a "chemical cure" has been promoted to further professional, commercial and political interests, and in the process, the harmful effects that drugs produce have been obscured.

She is author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure, published by Palgrave Macmillan, as well as numerous papers. She is one of the founders of the Critical Psychiatry Network, a group of psychiatrists who are critical of the dominance of the biomedical approach to understanding and treating mental distress.

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