What I could not verify

The largest increase in Europe

It is widely claimed that antidepressant consumption in Greece went from 19 to 66 defined daily doses per 1,000 inhabitants per day between 2000 and 2020 — an increase of 247%, the largest among European countries.

The arithmetic holds and the trend is confirmed by several converging sources. But I did not find the table: the study to which it is usually attributed covers 2010–2020 and mentions neither Greece nor this figure, and the report that gives the European average does not mention Greece. OECD.Stat did not yield the relevant table.

What is verified, for context: the average across 18 European countries rose from 30.5 to 75.3 DDD over the same twenty years, an increase of 147%. So even if the 66 is correct, in 2020 Greece stood below the European average in absolute terms. What would be notable is the rate, not the level.

[48] average across 18 European countries: analysis of OECD data, Euronews (Yanatma S.), 12.11.2022 — journalistic processing. The Greek figure remains unverified.

That Greeks consume two thirds more than the European average

The claim is attributed to a presentation of IQVIA data at a health economics conference. There is no publication: no journal article, no abstract, no institutional report, no posting in a university repository. The only source is a journalistic account of a spoken intervention.

It may be entirely correct. But a page that demands randomised-trial-level evidence from psychiatry cannot accept for itself a journalist's paraphrase of an unrecorded discussion.

Journalistic account of a conference intervention. No peer-reviewed publication or institutional report was located.

That the pharmaceutical companies silently abandoned the chemical imbalance theory

It circulates everywhere. No company has retracted or disavowed the theory in a statement, a regulatory filing, an internal document or a court record — no such primary source was located.

What is documented is narrower and must be stated as such: the advertising language softened over time — there is a peer-reviewed analysis of the advertisements themselves — and in one case a regulator imposed the withdrawal of a form of wording from a leaflet. Imposition is not abandonment.

No primary source was located. The existing references are secondary or non-scientific.

That Open Dialogue achieved 80% recovery without drugs, versus 5% with drugs

This is not merely unverified — it is wrong, and we report it because it circulates in the very community that is regarded as an ally of this page.

The “80%” and the “5%” come from two entirely unrelated studies: the first from Western Lapland in Finland (absence of residual psychotic symptoms, 82% at 5 years), the second from an American study in Chicago in a different era, with a different cohort, diagnosis and outcome definition. Neither of the two contains the other's figure.

And the “without drugs” does not hold: 29% of the Finnish cohort used neuroleptics at some point and 17% were taking them at the five-year follow-up.

We reject it explicitly. An argument does not become correct because it is convenient.

A splice of two unrelated studies. The claim is supported by neither of them.